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room, looking for a suicide note. I didn’t see one. There was a perfunctory knock at the door, and Dr. Prince stepped in. Prince gave me a perplexed stare as he reentered. And believe me when I tell you, with eyes like his, Dr. Prince’s perplexed stare was unrivaled.
    “There’s no note,” I blurted out guiltily.
    “The cops will be here”—he was interrupted by sirens outside the window—”any minute. There they are now.”
    “I was the last straw,” I said, pointing at my bloody name on the wall.
    Dr. Prince understood without explanation.
    “It’s not that simple, Mr. Prager. Those words are not like the numbered dots on a paper place mat. The mind is curved just as space and time. It defies easy answers. Straight lines don’t apply. The dots don’t connect in sequence.”
    The cops came in. They didn’t bother to knock.
    I was purposefully vague with my former brothers in blue. And they weren’t especially interested in me. If Rosen hadn’t written my name on the wall in his own blood before hanging himself, they probably would have dismissed me without a second thought. As it was, the detective who caught the case accepted my explanation without question. I had known the deceased man’s late sister in high school. He had looked me up, but I had been too busy to talk to him. I felt bad about not making time to talk to him and had therefore come to apologize. Why did I think he’d put my name on his wall? I didn’t know why, I said. I didn’t really know him, and he was crazy, after all, wasn’t he?
    I knew what I was doing. It isn’t like on TV. Sherlock Holmes is strictly for the PBS crowd. Cops want easy, reasonable answers, not headaches. They want to close cases, have a few beers, and go back home to Massapequa. They don’t eat their guts out over every stiff, especially losers like Arthur Rosen. It’s sad but true that cops value some lives more than others. Hey, I’m not throwing stones here. I’m as guilty as anyone. I suspect we all are. When Marina Conseco went missing, it seemed like the whole city mobilized to try and find her. When something happens to the Arthur Rosens among us, the city sighs in relief, says good riddance, and sleeps better that night.
    I wouldn’t sleep better for some nights to come.

Chapter Four
Thanksgiving
    Silence was neither golden nor unusual around the Maloneys’ holiday table. Maybe before Patrick had disappeared, before Francis Jr. was shot down over Vietnam, things had been livelier. Somehow I doubted it. The icy presence of my father-in-law was enough to dampen any celebration. But I couldn’t lay all the blame on his plate, not today, not after Arthur Rosen’s suicide.
    “You were awfully quiet at dinner,” Katy whispered, snuggling up to me on the couch.
    “Is Sarah asleep?”
    Katy knelt forward and stared directly into my eyes. “You know she is. What is it? What’s the matter?”
    “Remember that nut who came into the store?”
    “Karen Rosen’s brother.” She smiled. “The one who wanted you to find his dead sister.”
    “Last night, when I told you I was late getting up here because of an accident on the Tappan Zee Bridge … there was no accident,” I confessed. “I went to see him. His name is—was—Arthur Rosen.”
    “Was?”
    “He’s dead. He hung himself. Or is it ‘hanged himself’? Hanged, hung—whatever. I found him. Just in case I didn’t feel quite shitty enough, he wrote my name on the bedroom wall in his own blood. I pushed him over the edge when I turned him down.”
    Katy knew better than to argue the point. If I was determined to feel responsible, nothing she was apt to say was going to change it.
    She tried a different tack. “Did you ever find out about his sister?”
    “Remember when we first started seeing each other I told you about the girls from my high school who were killed in the fire in the Catskills?”
    “I remember. You mean she was one of the dead girls, Karen Rosen?”
    “She