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end of the office a black cop with thick hands and a broken nose was talking into a telephone receiver cradled on one shoulder. An old guy in green coveralls came through dragging a cardboard carton with a rope handle and emptying the ashtrays and wastebaskets into it. Haller was still talking to Terry. And I thought about all the times I'd spent in shabby squad rooms like this. Sometimes it felt like all the rooms I was ever in looked out onto alleys. And I thought about how it must feel to be twenty and alone and be in one at 5:30 A.M. and not sure you'd get out. The steam pipes hissed. I wanted to hiss back.
    More than that I wanted to run. The room was hot and stuffy. The air was bad. I wanted to get out, to get in my car and drive north. In my mind I could see the route, over the Mystic Bridge up Route One, north, maybe to Ipswich or Newburyport where the houses were stately and old and the air was clean and cold and full of the sea. Where there's a kind of mellowness and a memory of another time and another America. Probably never was another America though. And if I headed out that way I'd probably be sitting around the police station in Ipswich, smelling the steam pipes and the disinfectant and wondering if some poor slob deserved what he was getting.
    Quirk came out of his office. And looked at Haller. Then turned to me.
    "Come in and talk."
    I did. I told the same story to Quirk that I had to Belson. Exactly the same way. Quirk listened without a word. Looking straight at me all the time I talked. When I was through he said, "Okay, wait outside."
    I did. He called Terry Orchard in. Haller went with her. The door closed. I sat some more. The dick at the end of the room still talked into the phone. The two that had come in with Quirk continued to sit and look elaborately at nothing. The sun had come up and shone into one corner of the room. Dust motes drifted in languidly.
    "I can't stand it anymore," I said. "I'll confess, just don't give me the silent treatment anymore."
    The two detectives looked at me blankly.
    "Confess what?" one of them said. He had long curly sideburns.
    "Anything you want, just no more of the cold shoulder."
    Sideburns said to his partner, "Hey, Al, ain't he a funny guy? Right before you go off duty after working all night it's really great to have a funny guy like him around so you can go home happy. Don't you feel that way, Al?"
    Al said, "Aw, screw him."
    More silence. I got up and walked to the window. There was a heavy wire mesh across it so suspects wouldn't jump out, drop three stories to the ground, and run off. The windows were grimy, with a kind of ancient grime that seemed to have sunk into the glass. Three floors below a thin Puerto Rican kid with pointed shoes came out of the back of the coffee shop with a bucket and poured hot dirty water into the street. It steamed in the cold briefly. I looked at my watch. 6:40. The kid had got up awful early to come in and mop the floor. I wondered how late tonight he'd be there.
    Belson came out of Quirk's office with Terry, through the squad room, and out. Haller came out too, and walked over to me.
    "They've gone down to the lab. I think they'll book her," he said.
    I didn't say anything.
    He said, "Quickly, I wanted to check her story with you. She was asleep with her boyfriend in their apartment. Two men apparently known to Powell entered. Shot Powell, forced her to shoot Powell's body, drugged her, and left. She called you. You came. Sobered her up, got her story. Called the cops."
    "That's it," I said.
    "She knows you because the university employed you to find a missing rare book."
    "Manuscript," I said.
    "Okay, manuscript… You got in touch with her because the campus security man suggested that an organization she was part of might have taken it. She had your card. In trouble, she called you."
    "Right again," I said.
    "As stories go it's not a winner," Haller said.
    "I know," I said.
    "She's convincing when she tells it, though,"