While I was waiting for the laundry, I went two stores up to a stereo shop, walked in, and cut the clerk off before he could tell me they were closing. I said I wanted something basic and I could spend five hundred dollars. Fifteen minutes later, the backseat was filled with cartons and I was again on the road to music.

Whoever the apartment trashers were, I owed them one.

I drove home, dumped the laundry in the bedroom, and set the stereo up along the living room wall. It was higher-tech than my old one but did the same thing. It played Dave Brubeck and I cleaned. The moon was rising behind the bare trees, and in spite of the music, I felt very much alone.

Or maybe because of it.

Gerry Mulligan's sax was playing, low and soft and rippling like muscles. I put down the mop and went to the window and looked out.

It was ghostly in the moonlight, with the silhouettes of the black trunks of the trees and the black ridges that ran along to the west of the house. It got darker here than it did in the city, and it did it abruptly, always catching you off guard and leaving you thinking that the day had been abbreviated, called home early, that it had left without a formal good-bye. In the city, when the sun was jerked down behind the next block, lights went on to replace it. Here, in this town on the edge of wilderness, there were no lights. Or maybe just one or two. A lone streetlight that flickered with the wavering branches. A faraway lamp in somebody's den that showed dim in the distance, and when that somebody pulled the shade, showed dimmer still.

I stood and looked, leaning on the windowsill, my face near the cold glass, and wondered what the hell I was doing here. It was a feeling I had gotten only once or twice before, on bad days when I was lonely. I knew more people now. I had taken a lover, taken her just that morning. But I still felt alone. And worse than that, deep down, when everything stopped and I wasn't working or talking or drinking, I felt afraid.

Staring, I tried to shake it off. It had been a lousy week. The apartment. The fight. Arthur. Only a numb fool could be unconcerned, right? But then the feeling crept back, the one that was worse than the fear itself. It was the realization that it was the same feeling I'd had in the city. The feeling I got when I saw the younger reporters passing me on their way to the far reaches of East Brooklyn and the Bronx. The same fear that had brought me to this town, where I talked to school kids and told them I had just needed a change.

The fear that I'd made some giant, irreversible mistake.

I could stay, alone with myself, or I could leave. At eight, I drove back downtown and circled Main Street. The lights were out at the Review and all the stores looked closed, not for hours, but for a decade. I drove around again and circled back to the police station, parking the Volvo next to the police cruisers, where it looked like a refugee from Eastern Europe.

Vigue was there, with LeMaire, J. and a couple of reserves, young kids whom I had not formally met. LeMaire, J. was sitting at a desk reading an equipment catalog and Vigue was standing, one black boot up on a chair.

"I'm not knocking it," he said, as I came through the doorway. "Don't get me wrong."

One kid, short and squat with a red nose, nodded.

"I'm not knocking it. I got no complaints. I'm just saying, hey, there's a few things I've learned. Like, mister, don't expect a pat on the back. You know why? 'Cause it ain't coming. No matter what you do. And it don't come in the paycheck, either. Work in this place almost twenty years and you make what they get in that mill to start. Sometimes I think I should have my head examined. 'What do you do?' 'I chase shitheads around, and every once in a while, one of 'em tries to take my head off.' 'Oh, how nice.' "

The kids shifted in their uniforms and looked unhappy.

"You know where it's got to come from?" Vigue said. "It's got to come from inside. If it doesn't, you might as well take off that badge and all that equipment and go over to that mill and fill out an application. I mean it. Take it right off tonight and go over to that mill. If you don't have it in here for this job, forget it."

"Forty-five bucks for a little belly-band holster," LeMaire, J. said, peering at the pages of the catalog. "Maybe I won't put in for detective after all."

Vigue looked at me.

"And these guys," he said. "Only two words you need to know. No and comment. Don't turn your back. They'll whack you good. Speaking of whacking, that lawyer get hold of you yet?"

"Nope," I said.

"Cormier's. They want you to drop the assault charge. Poopsie doesn't want it on his record."

"Tough."

"Hey, it's up to you. Just one more dirtball. State pays for the lawyer. Lawyer gets him off. He goes out and does it again. We pay for another lawyer. He goes on welfare. System works just fine."

"So if I don't file the complaint?"

"He gets the disorderly, Class D. Misdemeanor. Pays the hundred bucks or whatever the judge decides on. The lawyer said something about him being ready to go back to work in the woods. I guess they don't take dirtballs."

"The rest of it just gets dropped?" I asked.

"Righto, chief. And I don't care one way or the other. I get paid every two weeks. You afraid of the guy or something, get the jitters, let him walk. But just one thing: Don't complain that the police department isn't doing anything about crime in Androscoggin. 'Cause you'll know what we're up against. Every friggin' day."

"Second the motion," LeMaire, J. said.

The kids looked puzzled, as if they weren't sure if I was the enemy. One made up his mind and gave me a cold stare. Vigue took a portable radio out of the charging rack and went out the door. I followed and stood behind him as he scraped the windshield.

"So anything on Bertin?" I asked.

Vigue scraped.

"Off the record?" he said.

"Sure."

"It'll take time."

"Talk to any of the people in those pictures?"

"I will. The ones I can make out. But don't look for much, all right? And don't come down here every day to bug me about it. Every couple days, maybe. Go easy on yourself."

"So you're gonna track those people down?"

"Jesus, don't make such a big deal out of it. We'll make some inquiries. But they won't say much, I promise you that. I go to that waitress at the Pine Tree and say, 'You may not have known it, but this guy you didn't know took your picture through a window when you were taking off your clothes, and now he's dead.' She says, 'Great. What's the bad news?' "

He put the scraper in the trunk.

"Think they knew him?"

"Doubt it. But what do you think? I told you we can't do it alone."

"What about state cops?"

"Staties? As far as they're concerned-and this is off the record; if you print it, I'll hang you-they think Arthur is some chump who fell in the water. They've got enough real live homicides with guns and knives to worry about some jerkoff who goes for a swim in friggin' November."

Cindy had left me a note and my messages before locking up. A lawyer named Richard Roberts had called from Auburn. Probably Cormier's court-appointed. A dirty business, that.

Somebody named Mrs. Gilbert wanted me to call her before five. It was quarter to six. I put the messages on my desk and put my feet up.

On Main Street, snow flurries showed in the strings of colored Christmas lights, and passing cars left black tracks on the whitened street. Across the street, the girl at McLaine's Fine Fashions was struggling to lock the door. She was probably swearing like a trooper, but I couldn't hear her.

Turn off the sound and the town looks quaint. Get too close and you hear the cursing, feel the hopelessness and discontent. I felt like somebody was turning up the volume, louder and louder. If I stayed very still, I could hear the sound of Arthur hitting the water.

12.

I tried to find something to do that night but nothing felt right. After looking at the Lewiston Sun and a day-old Boston Globe, I went home to the carnage and made my usual tuna sandwich, opened a can of Ballantine Ale. I ate half the sandwich and felt full. The beer tasted funny, but I forced myself to finish it as I leafed through the manuals for my new stereo equipment. The writing in the manuals was ungrammatical and depressing. I put them down and put Brubeck back on. Four guys playing a song a long time ago, plinking at a piano, tooting on horns. I turned it off.

After I cleaned up the kitchen a little more, I got another beer and stood at the counter with the unopened can in my hand. I took the phone and dialed Roxanne's number but it rang busy. A pang of jealousy came and went, a flash of some pretty-boy skier. But could he write an editorial?

I turned off the lights and pulled a kitchen chair up to the window by the table. With the lights out, I could see the snow falling behind the house. It was snowing softly and deliberately, and I sat with my feet up on the table and watched. For an hour, the only sound was the creaking of the joints in the chair when I shifted my weight. And then I heard something in the hall.

I got up slowly and moved quietly to the kitchen door. I heard it again. The scrape of a shoe. I waited. Listened. Waited. Then yanked the door open.

A man in a dark overcoat was standing in the hallway. His back was to me but then he turned. And smiled.

Martin.

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

"Didn't want to bother you, at home, at night," he said.

So he'd just stand in the hallway until I came out?

"You're not bothering me," I said. "You want to come in?"

"You're not doing anything?" Martin said.

"Just watching the snow."

"Just watching the snow, huh," he said.

What, I thought. An echo in here?

Martin was wearing a fur hat, the kind Russians wear. I'd heard that he had one, that people in town called him Khrushchev when he wore it. It was a gift from somebody, I thought, but I couldn't remember the whole story. I didn't feel like asking.

"Coffee?"

"Okay. Sure," Martin said.

I turned the burner on and put some water in a saucepan, then took two mugs from beside the sink and put instant coffee in them from the jar. We stood and waited for the water to boil. I stayed by the stove; Martin leaned against the counter about six feet away. The water on the burner began to hiss.

"So what's up?"

"The picture."

I waited.

"I'd really like to have it. You've got to get it for me, if you would, I mean. Could you? Just tell them you need it for the paper. I thought you could tell them that. You need it for the paper for ... I don't know what for. You could think of something."

I got the mugs and put them on the stove.

"They'd give it to you," Martin said. "They know you."

I felt like a priest or a politician or a Mafia don, hearing a request from a supplicant. Martin watched me for any faint glimmer of agreement.

"Martin, what's the big deal?" I said, pushing at the saucepan. "I don't understand why this is such a big thing."

He started to speak and stopped and looked away, toward the living room. I could smell his big old overcoat. It was starting to dry and it smelled like damp wool. The water started to simmer, and I poured it into the mugs and put one on the counter beside him. It was a Mets mug, but Martin didn't notice, or at least didn't comment.

We stood for a minute. Martin hadn't moved from his spot against the counter. I looked at him. He seemed smaller and older here, out of his natural setting and in mine. The newspaper-the office, the atmosphere-added to his stature somehow. Here he seemed small and tired, so much so that I almost decided against asking him about Arthur.

Almost.

"Can I ask you something, Martin? Another topic, but I wanted to ask you. Arthur. I was wondering if, when you were working with him, if you thought he was sort of funny about things. About women and things like that."

He looked at me.

"Martin, I can talk between us, right? Well, the cops think Arthur took pictures of women. Between us now. He took these pictures of women without their clothes on. They think Arthur hid in the bushes at night and took pictures of ladies getting undressed, that kind of thing."

Martin looked at the floor.

"I don't know," he mumbled, turning his hat in his hand.

"You sure he never did anything like that? Anything even sort of like that?"

He looked down. I waited. He looked some more and I waited some more. Any reporter knows that sometimes you filled the gaps in a conversation and sometimes you just waited while the person squirmed, searching for an out.

I sipped the coffee. It was awful because the water hadn't been hot enough.

"Well, hell," Martin said.

I waited. Martin tried the coffee and ran his hand over his mouth. I wondered if he even had the words in his vocabulary: voyeur, sexually repressed, stunted social development.

"I don't know, Jack," he said, finally. "Arthur was never much for the ladies. I don't know. The only thing I can think of is this time when there was this thing with the cheerleader girls at the high school. But that wasn't like this that you're talking about."

"What was it?"

"Pictures of basketball cheerleaders. You know, the little girls in their little skirts and what all."

"He took pictures of them?"

"Well, yeah. Nothing wrong with that, but he kept 'em in a book."

"A scrapbook of cheerleader pictures?"

"Well, yeah. Like a notebook with these prints pasted in it."

"How'd you find out about it?"

"He had some on his negatives one time. Five shots of the game and fifteen of the girls. I asked him, and he said it was for them, that they wanted some pictures, and he did it just to be nice. Then a couple of the kids complained to their parents and the parents called me and I had to have a talk with him. Known each other forever. I don't know if that made it any easier. But he told me he kept pictures of the kids over the years in a book sort of thing. Didn't mean any harm. This one mother said she was going to the police if he kept it up, and I told him that, and that put the fear of God in him, I'd say. I didn't hear much about it after that. But this wasn't like you're talking about."

"How long ago?"