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his
thumbs into his belt. “ Janus . That a girl’s name?”
    I just smiled. What was it to me if this
slob wasn’t up on his Greek deities?
    He slipped his nightstick from a loop on
his belt and used it to part my coat flap. He peered at the gun in my holster.
“A Lady Smith?” He rasped the back of a hand across three-day stubble. “That a
girl’s gun?”
    “Sure,” I said. “Bend over and I’ll see if
it’ll bake you a cake.”
    Before his face got any redder, I said,
“Cut the crap. I know Tunney told you to roll out the carpet for me.”
    He got surly then and let me through a
cordon that was an attempt to partition off a non-entity―the space where a
dumpster, and maybe a body, had been. The dumpster’s footprint was impressed
into the sod at the base of the landward side of the warehouse. Beside that,
the building looked like any one of the thousand warehouses jammed together on
the Manhattan bank of the East River.
    Above the flattened dirt, a stairway ran up
the wall, with one switchback, and terminated at a door.
    I climbed the stair and paused at the
corner to admire the view. A crowd of reporters and locals had gathered. To the
east, the remains of Queensboro bridge―a handful of pilings―stuck out of the
water like the bones of a dead colossus. Then I went on up to the landing. As I
got to the door, a technician emerged carrying a plastic bag. He was whistling,
but then, he was dry.
    “Any more bodies?” I said.
    He shook his head and said, “Not much of
anything. Maybe three sets of shoes came up here, but the rain isn’t helping.
Inside, we lifted some prints.”
    I entered and waited for my eyes to adjust
to the gloom. The only skylight in the place was long-clogged with debris.
    I was on a mezzanine overlooking a work
floor. The work floor was sunk in deep gloom, and my eyes couldn’t pick out
much more than an idle hoist wreathed in a century of cobwebs. In a corner of
the mezzanine was a foreman’s office. Around the walls were dirty looking
whiteboards and paper charts covered in scribbles that might as well have been
hieroglyphics.
    The furniture was sparse―a table, three
chairs all neatly tucked in. On the face of it, the only brand of death this
room was dealing was boredom.
    I knelt and scraped a digit across the
floor. It came away a dusty brown. I spotted a couple of gouges through the
dust that could have come from chair legs, and maybe fancied I could see some
of those boot prints the cop had mentioned.
    The table was stained and a smell of liquor
hung over it. In the middle of it sat a handful of tumblers on a serving tray.
They hadn’t been dusted for prints yet, so I retrieved from my coat the tumbler
my banker had drunk from and, with a glance at the back of the technician on
his knees in the foreman’s office, set it down next to the others. Fingerprint
identification in Newer York was a labor-intensive job, and murder scene
evidence had priority.
    I squatted again to peer under the table,
then at the skirting under the empty cabinets lining one wall. There was
nothing to see but dead cockroaches and a casino chip.
    I pinched the chip by the edges and pulled
it into better light. Issue of Diogenes Casino. Enough pocket money for me for
a year.
    On my way out I passed the technician with
the bag, coming back up the stairs. I wondered if he was going to bag the
cockroaches.
    From the landing I made out two sets of
tire tracks within the cordon, fresh enough to have gathered rain in stripes
and zigzags.
    I made my way to the edge of the swelling
crowd, and nearly collided with a guy trying in vain to light a limp cigarette.
When I offered him a light, his eyes widened a little more than my act of
kindness warranted.
    I said, “Why are you following me around?”
    His gaze pinballed through the crowd before
he said, “What are you talkin’ about?”
    “You were at the Miracle. And you weren’t
here when I showed up but now you are.”
    He sucked on the cigarette then