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Day. No, I’m wrong. That’s the eleventh.”
    Neither of us had been sober when we first came into one another’s lives. We’d met in the course of a case I was working. Years before, a woman in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn had been stabbed to death with an icepick, ostensibly by a serial murderer. After I’d left the force they finally pulled in the serial killer, and it turned out he couldn’t have committed this one particular murder. The victim’s father hired me to sift the cold ashes and try to find out who was responsible.
    Jan Keane had been married to a man named Corwin at the time of the original homicide, and had been a neighbor of the dead woman in Brooklyn. She had long since divorced and moved to Manhattan, and my investigation eventually led me to her loft on Lispenard Street, where the first thing we did was crack a bottle and get drunk together. The second thing we did was go to bed.
    It seemed to me that we were a pretty good match at both of those activities, but before we’d had a chance to practice much she announced that she couldn’t see me anymore. She’d tried AA before, she said, and was determined to give it another chance, and the conventional wisdom held that it wasn’t a good idea to hang out with a heavy drinker while you were trying to get sober yourself. I wished her the best of luck and left her to the world of church basements and sappy slogans.
    Before I knew it I was finding my own way into that world, and not having an easy time of it. I hit a couple of emergency rooms and detoxes. I kept putting a few sober days together and then picking up a drink to celebrate.
    One night I turned up on her doorstep, unable to think of any other way to get through the night sober. She gave me coffee and let me sleep on her couch. A couple of days later I went over there again, and this time I didn’t have to sleep on the couch.
    They advise against getting emotionally involved during early sobriety, and I have a feeling they’re right. Somehow, though, we both stayed sober, and for a couple of years we kept each other company. We never lived together, but we did reach a point where I was spending more nights at her place than at my own. She cleared out a dresser drawer for me and made some room in the closet, and an increasing number of people came to know that they could try me at Jan’s if they couldn’t reach me at my hotel.
    So it went on for a while, and it was good some of the time and not so good some of the time, and there came a time when it coughed and sputtered and died like a car running on empty. There were no big fights and not much in the way of drama. We didn’t run up against any irreconcilable differences. We just ran out of gas.
    “I have to talk to you,” she said now.
    “All right.”
    “I need a favor,” she said, “and I don’t want to get into it over the phone. Could you come down here?”
    “Sure,” I said. “Not tonight, though, because Elaine and I have plans.”
    “I met Elaine, didn’t I?”
    “That’s right, you did.” We’d spent a Saturday afternoon wandering through galleries in SoHo, and at one of them we’d run into Jan. “That must have been six months ago.”
    “Longer than that. I saw you at Rudi Scheel’s show at the Paula Canning Gallery, and that was the end of February.”
    “Jesus, has it been that long? I don’t know where the time goes.”
    “No,” she said. “Neither do I.”
    The words hung in the air.
    “Well,” I said, “tonight’s out. Jan, how urgent is this?”
    “How urgent?”
    “Because I could run down there right now if it’s really important, or if tomorrow’s time enough—”
    “Tomorrow would be fine.”
    “Do you still go to that Sunday afternoon meeting on Forsyth Street? I could meet you there.”
    “God, I haven’t been to Forsyth Street in ages. Anyway, I don’t think I want to meet you at a meeting. I’d rather you come here, if that’s all right with you.”
    “It’s fine