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the hell. They'd talked about this before. "Last couple of weeks I can't get through the night without dreaming about him."
"What kind of dreams?"
"Just dreams. Dumb ones."
"Yes, but what about?"
    "What is this? We're learning to be open about dreams, too?"
    "No, now we're learning how many times I have to ask the same question to get an answer. What kind of dreams?"
    "He just shows up with a bag of bagels, like normal. He makes fun of my clothes, like normal. He doesn't realize he's dead until I tell him he is and then I throw him the hell out."
    "Are you fast asleep or are these the pre-dawn grem lins?
    "They're the half-awake kind. Four in the morning." Lesko pushed a cold piece of onion ring around his plate. "Listen, you want some cheesecake?"
    "I'll have a bite of yours. Are you worried about anything in particular? Dreams like that usually come when you're worried but you don't know exactly what's bothering you."
    "Nothing's worrying me," he lied. Something was. He just didn't know what. It was a feeling he'd learned to pay attention to when he was a cop. Half the time it was nothing. Or it went away. But the feeling made him more alert. He'd see things, make connections, that he wouldn't have made otherwise. This time, for example, he was getting a feeling about the guy at the bar who kept looking at them.
    "Maybe Uncle David was haunting you." Susan de cided to lighten it. "Maybe he found out about Catholic Charities."
    "Maybe."
    A grin started small and then it spread across her face. "You know, I love this. This is great."
"What's great?"
    "I can't believe we're talking about bad dreams and ghosts."
    "You sucker me into telling you things and then you laugh at them?"
    "Oh, no." She reached for his hand again. "It's just that no one would ever believe it. My father, Raymond the Terrible Lesko, one of New York's all-time toughest cops, talking about seeing a ghost. Were you scared? Tell me you were a little bit scared."
    "I got a better idea," Lesko took her hand and squeezed it. "What if Raymond the Terrible Lesko just crushed your fingers for being such a smartass?"
     
    "So," Lesko shook off the subject of David Katz, "what have you been doing at the paper?"
    She spooned some whipped cream off her Irish Cof fee. "Just the regular news beat. A little City Hall. And I'm always looking for a good, juicy feature article."
    "There's not plenty happening every day in this town?"
    "Most days," she nodded. "But all the plum assign ments go to the senior writers, and half the time the TV reporters beat us to it, anyway. The trick is to dig some thing up by yourself and don't tell anyone until you've got it written. I thought I had one up in Connecticut but it doesn't seem to be going anywhere."
    “ Connecticut stories for a New York newspaper?"
    "Sure," she told him. "Half of Fairfield County com mutes to New York every day and most of them read the Post on the way home."
"What kind of story was it?"
"You ever been to Westport?"
    Lesko shook his head. "I don't hang around places where they wear pink pants and paint ducks on mail boxes."
    "Or put little onions in their drinks. I know." Her father had spent time in Greenwich about a year be fore, working on some weird case involving the Beck with Hotels family. He'd said he thought he'd stumbled into a convention of George Bush look-alikes. "Anyway, you remember my old roommate, Allie McCarthy? Well, now she's Allie Gregory, and she and her husband bought a house in Westport, which is a lot more laid- back than  planet Greenwich. I was up there last fall helping her fix it up. She and Tom—that's her husband —had collected a whole pile of literature on places to live in Connecticut. You know, stuff about tax rates, schools, quality of life and all that. In the pile there was this little statistical abstract that gave figures on abso lutely everything ... lottery income by week, water tables by average season, gypsy-moth infestation by area ... you get the idea." Susan