I placed one of my Crossroads cards on top of the TV. "I'm leaving a card with my number on it. If you hear anything, give me a call."

"Yeah, I ain't got enough troubles awready I got to start phonin' up mo'."

"You never know. You might need some help next time you get a special-delivery chicken foot."

Outside, dawn smudged the night sky like rouge on a chorus girl's cheek. Walking to the car, I dropped Toots' pearl-handled razor into a garbage can.

EIGHTEEN.

The sun was shining when I finally hit the sack, but I managed to sleep until almost noon in spite of the bad dreams. I was haunted by nightmares more vivid than any "Late Show" horror feature. Voodoo drums throbbed as Epiphany Proudfoot cut the rooster's throat. The dancers swayed and moaned, only this time the bleeding didn't stop. A crimson fountain gushed from the thrashing bird, soaking everything like a tropical rain, dancers all drowning in a lake of blood. I watched Epiphany go under and ran from my hiding place, gore splashing at my heels.

Blind with panic, I ran through deserted nighttime streets. Garbage cans stacked in pyramids; rats the size of bulldogs watching from sewers. The air putrid with rot. I ran on, somehow becoming the pursuer instead of the quarry, chasing a distant figure down endless unknown avenues.

No matter how fast I ran, I couldn't catch up. The runner eluded me. When the pavement ended, the chase continued along a flotsam-strewn beach. Dead fish littered the sand. An enormous seashell, tall as a skyscraper, loomed ahead. The man ran inside. I followed him.

The interior of the shell was high and vaulted, like an opalescent cathedral. Our footsteps echoed within the twisting spiral. The passage narrowed, and I came around a final turn to find my adversary blocked by the enormous, quivering, fleshy wall of the mollusk itself. There was no way out.

I seized the man by his coat collar and spun him around, pushing him back into the slime. He was my twin. It was like looking in the mirror. He gathered me in a brother's embrace and kissed my cheek. Lips, eyes, chin; his every feature was interchangeable with mine. I relaxed, overwhelmed by a wave of affection. Then I felt his teeth. His fraternal kiss grew savage; strangler's hands found their way to my throat.

I struggled, and we went down together, my fingers groping for his eyes. We thrashed on the hard, nacreous floor. His grip relaxed as I gouged with my thumbs. He made no sound during the struggle. My hands sank deep into his flesh, familiar features oozing between my fingers like wet dough. His face was a shapeless pulp lacking bone or cartilage and when I pulled away my hands were mired there, like a cook caught in a suet pudding. I woke up screaming.

A hot shower settled my nerves. I was shaved, dressed, and driving uptown inside of twenty minutes. I dropped the Chevy off at my garage and walked to the out-of-town newsstand next to Times Tower. Dr. Albert Fowler's picture was on the front page of Monday's Poughkeepsie New Yorker. NOTED DOCTOR FOUND DEAD said the headline. I read all about it over breakfast at the Whelan's drugstore in the corner of the Paramount Building.

The cause of death was listed as suicide although there was no note found. The body was discovered Monday morning by two of Dr. Fowler's colleagues who grew worried when he didn't show up for work or answer his phone. The newspaper had most of the details right. The woman in the framed photograph clutched to the dead man's chest was his wife. No mention was made of the morphine or the missing ring. The contents of the dead man's pockets were not listed, so I had no way of knowing whether he had taken the ring off himself or not.

I had a second cup of coffee and headed for my office to check the mail. There was the usual third-class junk and a letter from a man in Pennsylvania offering a ten-dollar mail-order course in cigarette ash analysis. I swept the whole batch into the wastebasket and considered my options. I had planned on driving out to Coney Island to try to locate Madame Zora, Johnny Favorite's gypsy fortuneteller, but decided to play a long shot and go back up to Harlem first. There was a lot Epiphany Proudfoot hadn't told me last night.

I got my attache case out of the office safe and was buttoning my overcoat when the phone rang. It was long-distance, person-to-person collect from Cornelius Simpson. I told the operator I would accept the charges.

A man's voice said: "The maid gave me your message. She seemed to think it was some kind of emergency."

"Are you Spider Simpson?"

"Last time I looked I was."

"I'd like to ask you some questions about Johnny Favorite."

"What kind of questions?"

"Have you seen him at all in the past fifteen years for starters?"

Simpson laughed. "Last time I saw Johnny was the day after Pearl Harbor."

"Why is that so funny?"

"It's not funny. Nothing about Johnny was ever very funny."

"Then how come all the laughter?"

"I always laugh when I think of how much money I lost when he walked out on me," Simpson said. "It's a whole lot less painful than crying. Wha's this all about, anyway?"

"I'm doing a story for Look on forgotten vocalists of the forties. Johnny Favorite is at the top of the list."

"Not my list, brother."

"That's fine," I said. "If I spoke to just his fans, I wouldn't get a very interesting story."

"The only fans Johnny had were strangers."

"What can you tell me about his affair with a West Indian woman named Evangeline Proudfoot?"

"Not a damn thing. This is the first I've heard of it."

"Did you know he was involved in voodoo?"

"Sticking pins in dolls? Well, it figures; Johnny was a weirdo. He was always into something strange."

"Such as what?"

"Oh, let's see; one time I saw him catching pigeons up on the roof of our hotel. We were out on the road someplace, I can't remember just where, and he was up there with a big net like some kind of Looney Tunes dog catcher. I thought maybe he didn't like the chow in the place, but later, after the show, I dropped by his room, and there he was with the damn pigeon all split open on the table, poking through the guts with a pencil."

"What was that all about?"

"That's what I asked him. 'What're you up to?' I said. He told me some fancy word I can't remember, and when I asked him to put it in English, he said he was predicting the future. He said it was what the priests in ancient Rome used to do."

"Sounds like that ol' black magic had him in its spell," I said.

Spider Simpson laughed. "You said it, brother. If it wasn't pigeon guts, it was some other damn thing, tea leaves, palm readers, yoga. He wore a heavy gold ring with Hebrew characters all over it. As far as I know, he wasn't Jewish."

"What was he?"

"Damned if I know. Rosicrucian, or some damn thing. He carried a skull in his suitcase."

"A human skull?"

"Once upon a time it was human. He said it came from the grave of a man who murdered ten people. Claimed it gave him power."

"Sounds like he was putting you on," I said.

"Could be. He used to sit and stare at it for hours before a performance. If that was a put-on, it was a damn good one."

"Did you know Margaret Krusemark?" I asked.

"Margaret who?"

"Johnny Favorite's fiancee."

"Oh, yeah, the debutante society girl. I met her a few times. What about her?"

"What was she like?"

"Very pretty. Didn't talk much. You know the type, lots of eye contact but no conversation."

"I heard somewhere she was a fortuneteller."

"That may be. She never told me mine."

"Why did they break up?"

"I wouldn't know."

"Can you give me the names of any of Johnny Favorite's old friends? People who might be able to help me out with the story."

"Brother, aside from bonehead in the suitcase, Johnny didn't have a friend on earth."

"What about Edward Kelley?"

"Never heard of him," Simpson said. "I knew a piano player named Kelly in K.C., but that was years before I ran into Johnny."

"Well, thanks for the information," I said. "You've been a big help."

"Anytime."

We both hung up.

NINETEEN.

I dodged chuck-holes on the West Side Highway up to 125th and drove east along Harlem's Rialto, past the Hotel Theresa and the Apollo Theatre, over to Lenox Avenue. The neon sign was dark in the window of Proudfoot Pharmaceuticals. A long green shade reached all the way down behind the front door, and Scotch-taped to the glass was a cardboard sign that said CLOSED TODAY. The place was locked up tight.

I found a wall phone in a luncheonette in the next block and looked up the number. There was no listing for Epiphany Proudfoot, only one for the store. I tried but got no answer. Thumbing through the directory, I located Edison Sweet's number. I dialed the first four digits and hung up, deciding a surprise visit would be more effective. Ten minutes later, I was parked on 152nd Street across from his building.

At the entrance, a young housewife with two small children bawling underfoot was struggling with a shopping bag and fumbling in her purse for the key. I offered to help and held her bag as she opened the front door. She lived on the ground floor and thanked me with a weary smile when I handed back the groceries. The kids clung to her coat, snuffling runny noses, and stared up at me with wide, brown eyes.

I climbed the stairs to the third floor. There was no one else on the landing, and when I bent to check the make of the lock on Toots' apartment I found the door was not quite shut. I pushed it all the way open with my foot. A vivid red splash stained the opposite wall like a Rorschach test blot. It might have been paint, but it wasn't.

I closed the door behind me, leaning my back against it until the lock caught.

The room was a mess, furniture thrown about haphazardly on a carpet waved with wrinkles. Someone put up quite a fight. A shelf of flowerpots lay overturned in the corner. The curtainrod was bent in a V and the drapes sagged like the stockings of a hooker on a week-long drunk. Amid the wreckage the TV stood intact. The set was switched on and a soap opera nurse discussed adultery with an attentive intern.

I was careful not to touch anything as I stepped over the upended furniture. The kitchen showed no signs of struggle. A cold cup of black coffee sat on the Formica tabletop. It seemed very homey until I looked back into the living room.

Beyond the babbling TV, a short, dark hall led to a dosed door. I got my latex surgeon's gloves out of the attache case and rolled them onto my hands before turning the knob. One look in the bedroom made me want a drink badly.

Toots Sweet lay on his back on the narrow bed, his hands and feet bound to the posts with lengths of cotton clothesline. He would never get any deader. A crumpled, bloodsoaked flannel bathrobe draped his pot belly. Beneath his black body, the sheets were stiff with blood.

Toots' face and body were badly bruised. The whites of his open, bulging eyes were yellowed, like antique ivory cueballs, and stuffed into his gaping mouth was something resembling a fat, severed hunk of bratwurst. Death by asphyxiation. I knew that without waiting for the autopsy.

I took a closer look at what protruded from his swollen lips and suddenly one drink wasn't going to be enough. Toots had choked to death on his own genitalia. Outside, in the courtyard three flights down, I heard the happy laughter of children.

No power on earth could have made me lift that matted bathrobe. I knew where the murder weapon came from without peeking. On the wall above the bed, a number of childlike drawings had been daubed in Toots' blood: stars, spirals, long zigzag lines representing snakes. The stars, three of them, were five-pointed and upside down. Falling stars were getting to be a habit.

I told myself it was time to pack up and leave. No percentage in sticking around. But my snooper's instinct made me look through his dresser drawers and check out the closet first. It took ten minutes to go over the room, and I didn't find anything worth looking at twice.

I said goodbye to Edison Sweet and closed the bedroom door on the sightless stare of his bulging eyes. My tongue felt heavy and dry in my mouth when I thought of what was stuffed in his. I wanted to check out the living room before I left, but there was too much dirt strewn about and I was afraid of leaving heelprints. My business card was no longer on the TV. I hadn't turned it up among his things, and a fresh paper bag in the kitchen meant the trash went out earlier. I hoped my card went with it.

At the front door, I squinted through the peephole before letting myself out. I left the door open a crack, just the way I found it, and peeled off my rubber gloves, shutting them inside the calfskin case. I paused at the top of the landing and listened to the silence below. No one was using the stairs. The housewife on the first floor might remember me, but there was nothing I could do about that.

I made it down the stairs without being seen, and when I left the building, the only ones around were a group of small children playing hopscotch in the courtyard. They didn't look up as I passed.

TWENTY.

Three straight shots settled my nerves and put me in a philosophic frame of mind. It was a quiet neighborhood bar called Freddie's Place or Teddy's Spot or Eddie's Nest, something along those lines, and I sat with my back to the TV and thought things over. Now I had two dead men on my hands. They both knew Johnny Favorite and wore five-pointed stars. I wondered if Toots' front tooth was missing like the doctor's ring, but didn't want to know badly enough to go back and look. The stars maybe were a coincidence; it's a common design. And maybe it was just by chance that a junkie doctor and a blues piano player both knew Johnny Favorite. Maybe. But deep down in my gut I had a feeling that it was tied in to something bigger. Something enormous. I scooped my change off the damp bar top and went back to work for Louis Cyphre.

The drive out to Coney Island was a pleasant distraction. Rush hour was still ninety minutes off and traffic moved freely along F. D. R. Drive and through the Battery Tunnel. I rolled down my window on the Shore Parkway and breathed the cold sea air blowing in through the Narrows. By the time I reached Cropsey Avenue the smell of blood was gone from my nostrils.

I followed West 17th Street down to Surf Avenue and parked beside a boarded-up bumper-car ride. Coney Island in the off-season had the look and feel of a ghost town. The skeletal tracks of the roller coasters rose above me like metal and timber spiderwebs, but the screams were missing and the wind moaned through the struts, lonesome as a train whistle.

A few odd souls wandered about Surf Avenue looking for something to do. Sheets of newspaper blew like tumbleweed down broad, empty streets. Overhead, a pair of sea gulls hovered, scanning the ground for discarded scraps. All along the avenue, cotton candy stands, fun houses, and games of chance were tightly shuttered, like clowns without makeup.

Nathan's Famous was open for business as always, and I stopped for a hot dog and a cardboard cup of beer under the boldly lettered billboard facade. The counterman looked like he'd been around since the days of Luna Park, and I asked if he'd ever heard of a fortuneteller named Madame Zora.

"Madame who?"

"Zora. She was a big attraction here back in the forties."

"Beats me, bud," he said. "I only had this job less'n a year. Ask me something about the Staten Island Ferry. I ran the night food concession on the Gold Star Mother fifteen years. Go on, ask me something."

"Why'd you quit?"

"Can't swim."