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manner got very strange and he would have these weird facial expressions, and also he stopped being clean about his person. I know your home group’s on Ninth Avenue and you live in the neighborhood, so maybe you knew George.”
    “Just by sight.”
    “So you know what I’m talking about. He wouldn’t bathe and he wouldn’t change his clothes, and of course the beard and the hair. If you bought clothes for him you were just wasting your money because he would wear one pair of pants until they fell apart even if he had six other pairs hanging in his closet.
    “It was like he had a certain way to live and nothing was going to make him change. He had a place to live, you know, or maybe you don’t know. They hung that homeless tag on him and that’s all you hear, but actually he had a basement room on Fifty-sixth Street. He found it himself and he paid the rent on it.”
    “By taking back aluminum cans?”
    “He gets a couple of checks each month, the V.A. and SSI, and that covered his rent with a little left over. Right after he got the room, my sister and I made an arrangement with the landlord, that if George ever missed coming up with the rent we’d take care of it. Never happened once. You see a guy, dirty bum on a park bench, you figure here’s a person incapable of functioning. Yet he paid the rent on time each month. In the sense of doing the things that mattered to him, you would have to say he functioned.”
    “How is he holding up now?”
    “All right, I guess. I had a very brief visit with him yesterday afternoon. They had him on Rikers Island and I drove all the way out there only to find that they’d moved him to Bellevue for psychiatric evaluation. He was in the prison ward on the nineteenth floor. I only had a few minutes with him. I hated to leave him, but I got to tell you I was glad to get out of there.”
    “How did he look to you?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. I suppose most people would say he looks good because they cleaned him up some, but all I could notice was the look in his eyes. George tends to stare, it’s one of the things about him that puts people off, but now he’s got this haunted look in his eyes that could break your heart.”
    “I assume he has an attorney.”
    “Oh, sure. I was gonna get a lawyer for him but they had already appointed someone and the guy seems all right. He’s weighing a couple of options right now. He can plead my brother not guilty by reason of insanity or diminished capacity, or he can avoid a trial altogether by arranging for him to plead guilty to some sort of reduced charge and be sentenced to a long term in a treatment facility. It amounts to about the same thing either way. He winds up institutionalized, but it’s not prison and there’s the possibility he can get some help.”
    “How does George feel about it?”
    “He’s okay with it. He says he might as well plead, seeing as he figures he did it.”
    “Then he admits he killed Holtzmann.”
    “No, he
figures
he did it, figures he must have done it. He doesn’t remember it but he understands the evidence against him and he’s not stupid, he knows how strong their case is. His take on it is he can’t swear he did it but he can’t swear he didn’t, either, so they’re probably right.”
    “Was he in a blackout?”
    “No, but his memory is never what you’d call reliable. He’ll recollect events but be completely wrong about their sequence, or he’ll misremember something, he’ll have an incident or a conversation different from the way it actually happened.”
    “I see.”
    “You’ve been very patient with me, Matt, and I appreciate it. I know I’m taking all day to get to the point.”
    “That’s all right, Tom.”
    “The thing is,” he said, “everybody’s satisfied, you know? The cops have the case cleared and the press off their backs. The D.A.’s looking at either a plea bargain or a trial he can’t lose. George is ready to go along with whatever his lawyer