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role of a rookie. Both of them looked like they might have been extras on a TV cop show.
    “Thanks—black.” A moment later he buried his face in the steam from a paper cup, grateful that it killed the smells of death and disinfectant.
    “He was found in an alley off Larkin, about eight o’clock last night,” McNeal said. He straddled a wooden chair and leaned his elbows on the back. “Actually, he was found in a packing crate in the alley.”
    The details were going to be sickening, Artie thought. No way was he prepared for them, no way he could tell the police to stop.
    “Somebody … dumped the body there?”
    Sullivan interrupted before McNeal had a chance to answer. “Don’t think so. His keys and a pocket flashlight were also in the box, ditto his wallet. So far as we know, nothing was missing.” His eyes never left Artie’s. “It was a crate big enough to hide in. It’s possible he crawled in it to get away from his killers.”
    Artie looked up from his coffee, bewildered. Plural. How did they know that?
    “He wasn’t alone,” Sullivan added. He had settled comfortably back in a chair a few feet away, his own cup of coffee on the tiled floor beside him. “Some homeless guy was in the crate with him. Apparently he was living in it, judging from the crap strewn around. He was dead too, but he wasn’t torn up. Alcoholic. Probably died of natural causes.”
    “I don’t get it,” Artie said.
    Sullivan shrugged but offered no explanations. “Any idea what Dr. Shea was doing in the Tenderloin that time of night?”
    Artie shook his head. “We were all supposed to meet last night at eight, at Soriano’s on Geary—”
    Sullivan glanced over at McNeal.
    “You know the place, Mike?”
    “Yeah—good Italian, pricey. They got rooms in back for parties.”
    Sullivan turned back to Artie. “Who do you mean by ‘we’?”
    Artie took a big swallow of coffee and felt it burn all the way down. “We’re members of a club. Larry was supposed to be the speaker that night.”
    McNeal, suddenly alert, said, “What kind of club, Mr. Banks?”
    “We’re all professional men—some women, too,” Artie said slowly. “We meet every three weeks and talk about the latest in our different fields. I’m a television newswriter, Larry was a doctor, Mitch Levin is a psychiatrist—”
    “Any idea what Dr. Shea was going to talk about?” Sullivan interrupted.
    “Nobody ever knows; that’s the point.”
    Sullivan and McNeal glanced at each other without expression. Sullivan cleared his throat.
    “A couple of kids in the neighborhood said they saw Dr. Shea running north up Larkin. From their description, he was either on drugs, drunk, or running away from somebody. But there was nobody chasing him. That would have been around seven-thirty or so. One kid saw him duck into an alley about half a block south of the Century Theater. Sometime later a cook in a Thai restaurant went out in the alley to dump some garbage and saw a man standing by the crate. The cook asked what he was doing there and the man didn’t answer, just walked away.”
    Sullivan finished his coffee and put the cup back down on the floor.
    “It’s well enough lit back there that the cook should have been able to make some identification, but he claimed he didn’t get a good look. He sounded a little spooked—he was the one who found the body.”
    “Larry didn’t drink,” Artie said. “He didn’t do drugs either.”
    Sullivan stared at him. “Any idea where his wife might have gone? We had the Oakland police check this morning. Nobody home, no sign of foul play.”
    Artie felt shock and then a sudden wave of fear. He shook his head.
    McNeal had been teetering on the back two legs of his chair and now dropped to the floor and leaned forward.
    “Dr. Shea didn’t make any rounds in the Tenderloin, did he? Drop in on some of the down-and-outers? Maybe some of the prostitutes?”
    Artie smothered a glare and shook his head. “He was a