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Van Dorn? At The Chauncey Arms?” He blinked again. “When did he supposedly register this room?”
    I saw no harm in telling him this either. “Yesterday morning around ten or so.” I didn’t like the look on Bixby’s face. “Why?”
    “Well, it wasn’t him. That’s impossible,” Bixby said.
    “Why?”
    “We broke the story in last night’s Evening Edition,” Bixby said, “but you probably missed it. Silas Van Dorn died yesterday morning from a massive heart attack on Long Island. And he was eighty-four years old.”

BLUE REVERIE
    I DECIDED to mourn the early death of my only lead alone. It was just after five-fifteen when I left Bixby at Lefty’s and started my long, lonely walk back to the station house. The sky was just beginning to brighten, but it was already as humid as noontime. Cabs were hard to come by, and I didn’t have enough money to pay for one anyway. Sure, I could’ve badged a cabbie and made him take me there for free, but that wouldn’t have been fair. Cabbies needed to eat, too. Besides, I only had a little more than a couple of hours until my shift ended at eight.
    Normally I’d be dreaming up ways to kill time until my replacements arrived. But that morning, going home was the last thing on my mind. Silas Van Dorn was all I could think about. Resting in peace. Silas Van Dorn, Bixby had told me, had died yesterday morning at the family’s Hamptons vacation home from a bad heart. More than ninety miles away, around the time he’d supposedly gotten a room at The Chauncey Arms. I laughed at myself as I walked along. Boy, it didn’t take long for my theory to fall apart, did it? Nice try, Charlie, but you were hunting a dead man all along.
    Now I’d never have the chance to ask Van Dorn why someone might’ve used his name to rent that room. Hell, there wasn’t even any mystery to it any more. The killer must’ve seen Van Dorn’s name in the paper and decided to use it. The killer…
    I stopped dead in my tracks. A man bumped into me from behind and called me a goddamned fool for stopping in the middle of the street like that. But I barely heard what he’d said. My mind was elsewhere. Because the killer couldn’t have read about Van Dorn’s death in the paper yesterday afternoon. His death hadn’t been reported in the papers until that night. Bixby had said so himself. I suddenly felt that cold feeling of truth run through me. Of possibility. Maybe I was onto something after all. The killer had used Silas Van Dorn’s name on purpose. That meant he must have known Silas was dead before it had been reported in the papers. That meant there had to be some kind of connection between the Van Dorns and the dead girl. And that’s when my thoughts started to turn from the pursuit of justice to a pursuit of a more personal kind.
    After all, a rich family was now linked to a dead girl. Maybe there was something else in this for Charlie Doherty. Something more than just redemption. Maybe something more tangible, something more to fill my pockets than just a badge. The last thing the grieving Van Dorns needed right now was a scandal involving a dead girl in a sleazy hotel. Maybe there could be a little hush money at the end of this for Detective Charlie Doherty. Maybe more than just a little. It wasn’t admirable, but like they say: old habits die hard. I didn’t know what the girl’s connection to the Van Dorns might be, but there had to be one. And I was sure as hell going to find out what it was. Not the daytime boys. Not the real detectives.
    Me.
    Because there was something more than redemption and pride at the end of this now. Something more permanent. The oldest friend I had left in this world. Money. I ducked into the Horn and Hardart’s off Thirty-eighth and Broadway and hit the payphone in the back. I had the operator connect me with the station house and reached Loomis.
    “How’s Frank making out with those pictures?”
    “Started developing them an hour or so ago,”