"So what do you want to do here?" Tony asked.

"About the envelope?" Georgie asked, lowering his voice.

"Yeah."

Both of them whispering now.

"Let's say the old lady put it there ten years ago, forgot it was there."

"Then why did she send Priss the key?"

"Who knows why old ladies do things? Maybe she had an apparition she was about to get knocked off."

"Anyway, it doesn't matter either way. The old lady's dead, how can she tell Priss what was in that locker?"

"Her note didn't say anything about what was in the locker. All it said was go to the locker, that's all."

"What it said exactly was go to locker number thirty-six at the Rendell Road Bus Terminal." "Exactly."

"What I'm saying," Georgie said, "As if Priss knew there was a hundred large ones in that locker, you think she'd have trusted us to come for it?"

"Us? She'd have to be out of her mind."

"Exactly the point."

"What you're saying is she didn't know." "What I'm saying is she doesn't know." Silence. The clink of silverware against coffee and saucers. The trill of the black woman's laughter at the nearby table.

The buzz of conversation from the college boys on the other side of the room. Other voices. And the loudspeaker announcing the arrival of a bus from Philadelphia at gate number seven. At the center of all this, the core of Tony's and Georgie's thoughtful silence.

"We're the only ones who know," Tony said at last.

"So why should we turn it over to her?" Georgie asked.

Tony merely smiled.

The next bus back to school wouldn't be leaving for an hour yet. This gave them plenty of time to work out what in the film industry was called a back story..

What seemed perfectly apparent to them was that the only people with whom they'd had any contact after the bouncer tossed them out of the Jammer were all now dead. This was definitely in their favor. If they hadn't even talked to anyone after telling the bouncer to go fuck himself, then there wasn't anyone alive who

could say they were uptown in Diamondback getting involved with three people who would later cause trouble for each other, the girl by refusing to mention she was suffocating, the two black drunks getting into a fight over her money and her stash, one of them ending up drowned, the other stabbed, boy.

"What about the cabdriver?" Richard the Second asked.

"Uh-oh, the cabbie," Richard the Third said. "What about him?"

Richard the First said. "He picked us up downtown, he dropped us off uptown. So what?"

Two guys who looked like gangsters in a Martin Scorsese movie were walking past the table, on their way out of the restaurant. The boys lowered, their voices, averted their eyes. In this city, it was best to be circumspect. Witness what had happened uptown when they'd got too chummily careless with three people who'd turned out to be unwholesome types.

"See that bulge under his coat?" Richard the Third whispered as soon as the men pushed through the door into the terminal proper. Outside, despite the snow, buses kept coming and going. The two men disappeared in the swirling flakes.

"How'd you like to meet one of those guys in a dark alley?" Richard the Second said.

None of the Richards seemed to realize that they themselves were now prime candidates for guys you would not care to meet in a dark alley.

Or anywhere else, for that matter. They had killed three people.

They qualified. But the odd thing about what had happened was that it now seemed to be something

they'd read about or watched on television or seen on stage or in a movie theater. It simply did not seem to have happened to them.

So as they discussed whether or not who'd driven them to Diamondback posed any kind a threat, they dismissed from their reasoning reason for their concern. They had been sitting in the back of a dark cab, he could not have seen their faces clearly. There had been a thick plastic between them and the driver's seat, further obscuring vision. They had placed the fare and a reasonable tip into the little plastic holder that flipped out toward them. The only words that passed between them and the cabbie was when Richard the First told him their destination. Ainsley and North Eleventh, he'd said, The driver hadn't even muttered acknowledgment.

The way Richard the First figured it, and he told this to the other two Richards now, the camel jockeys in this city were involved solely with calculating how more months they'd have to work here before they saved enough to go back home. This was why they never spoke to anyone. Never even nodded to indicate they'd heard you. Never said thank you, God forbid. They were too busy reckoning the nickels and dimes they'd need to build their shining palaces in the sand. "He won't be a problem,"

Richard the First said. But none of them acknowledged the events that had followed that fateful ride uptown. None of them even whispered the possibility that they may have been seen by someone as they entered black Richard's building in the company of that unfortunate girl who'd later been too timid or stupid to mention or even indicate

that she was having trouble breathing. Acknowledging the cause of their concern would concede implication.

No.

The boys were clean.

Their bus would leave in forty-five minutes.

They would be back at school in an hour and forty-five minutes.

Everything there would be white and still and clean.

"Nothing happened," Richard the First said aloud.

"Nothing happened," the other two Richards said.

"Swear," Richard the First said, and placed his clenched fist on the tabletop.

"I swear," Richard the Second said, and covered the fist with his hand.

"I swear," Richard the Third said, and likewise covered the fist.

The loudspeaker announced final boarding of the seven-thirty-two bus to Poughkeepsie.

The boys ordered another round of milk shakes.

Two pieces of significant information came into the squad room in the final hour of the night shift. Detective Hal Willis, sitting in his shirtsleeves in the overheated room, watching the snowflakes swirling outside, took both calls. The first came at a quarter past eleven. It was from a detective named Frank Schulz who asked to speak to either Carella or Hawes, and then settled for Willis when he said he'd give them the information.

Schulz was one of the technicians who'd examined the Cadillac registered to Rodney Pratt. He informed Willis, by the way, that the limo had already been

returned to the owner, receipt in Schulz's possession did Willis want it faxed over or could Schulz drop it in the mail, the receipt? Willis told him to mail it.

"What we got was a lot of feathers" Schulz said.

"Now, I don't know if you're familiar with the difference between down and contour feathers..."