"Diego, will you-"

"f.u.c.k you, man! Get out of here. Get out and leave me alone. I wish I was dead, I wish I was with her-dead. I don't care, I don't care, I don't care. I just hope that f.u.c.king cop of hers is burning in h.e.l.l. I just wanna see how much she loves him now."

I took a couple of tentative steps in his direction. When he turned toward me his face was soggy, old. Then he opened his mouth and a raw, primordial scream came out. The elderly man I'd seen earlier appeared then, along with one of my admirers from out front. I pushed my way past them.

Out on the street again, I walked quickly, taking deep breaths of the heady green air. Talk about burning in h.e.l.l, Diego's pain had scorched me. I wanted to put some distance between me and all that throbbing hurt.

I didn't get very far.

That f.u.c.king cop of hers. See how much she loves him now.

That cop. Diego wasn't talking about Leman Sweet. He meant Charlie Conlin-Sig. Except, Inge didn't know Sig was a cop. So how did Diego know? Unless ... Oh.

There had been nothing in the papers about Sig's death. Presumably because the police had suppressed the story. The murder of a poor blind girl and her dog had made a splash in the news, but there had been no mention of a lover killed a few days earlier. Certainly there had been no mention of Charlie Conlin at the time Diego was questioned.

The lovesick little b-boy from the Dominican Republic seemed to know one secret too many.

I called Leman Sweet-again.

Diego had obtained a fresh beer. He was just leaving when Leman Sweet swung into the locker room, with me two paces behind him. We three had a kind of slapstick collision in the doorway.

The boy stood paralyzed, his eyes locked with the ma.s.sive cop's. Sweet's big booted foot spasmed suddenly and Diego landed upright on the bench he had tried to destroy fifteen minutes ago.

Sweet strode over to the boy. "You got something to say to me, don't you, Pancho?"

Diego only winced.

Sweet s.n.a.t.c.hed him up off the seat as though Diego were a shopping bag full of air. Fingers against his throat, he flung the boy in my direction.

I screamed and tried to throw my arm protectively across Diego's chest.

The detective sent me halfway across the room with a shrug of one shoulder.

"Don't kill him!" I shouted.

"Open that motherf.u.c.king locker, you," Sweet boomed.

"Open it yourself," the kid wheezed.

Sweet hit him in the stomach savagely and Diego crumpled.

I moaned then and covered my eyes.

Sweet took a fistful of the boy's hair and twisted him over to the wall. "Open it!"

"Open it!" I cried, echoing him. "He'll kill you!"

Diego complied.

"You move and I'll shoot your heart out," Sweet told him. The detective thrust both hands into the locker and began pulling objects out in a frenzy. Diego stood there maniacally squeezing his palms together. "What's the matter, you think I'm gonna break your crack pipe? What am I gonna find in here, Diego, huh? What am I gonna find?"

Sweet picked through tee-shirts and hairbrushes and jock straps and plastic shampoo containers, heedlessly flinging each thing away from him. Then he came out with what appeared to be a crowbar and a small precision drill. "Somebody started working on the cylinder of your door lock that night. Probably using just this kinda stuff," he said over his shoulder to me. He placed the objects gently on the floor.

Next came a grimy white envelope closed with a paperclip. He spilled out the contents onto the wooden bench: photographs. He looked through them quickly, replaced them, walked over to the silent Diego and slammed the envelope into his ashen face. Once Sweet had handcuffed the kid, he took the envelope and tossed it over to me.

I opened the flap and removed the stack of photos. They were all of Inge, in various stages of nudity. She may or may not have known she was being photographed-or spied on-whatever.

A hundred questions were running through my mind. About Diego and Inge. About Inge and Sig. About love turned to madness, and madness to murder. Was Diego, too, part of the Rhode Island Red mystery? Was he possibly connected to Henry? Or was his part in all this mayhem and unhappiness strictly localized, coincidental-having only to do with his obsession with the blind woman?

I looked up from the pictures at that moment, looked across the room to see Leman Sweet aiming his revolver at the bridge of Diego's nose. I just stood there waiting for the roar of the gun. No matter how horrible it was going to be, I knew I wouldn't be able to look away.

"You killed my partner, didn't you, sc.u.m? You put that ice pick in Charlie."

Diego looked right into the barrel of that gun. Slowly, slowly, he raised his hands, almost in a gesture of supplication and began to nod his head.

Just like in the movies, the action seemed to take place through a curtain of gauze, slow, so slow, everything happening in slow motion. Sweet pulling back the hammer of the gun. Diego importuning, nodding. Me doing my imitation of Buckwheat.

Then I heard Sweet reciting the Miranda warnings about the right to silence and hiring an attorney. He was reholstering his gun.

"I've got to ask you some questions," I said to him when he had finished.

"Uh uh. You ain't got to ask me nothing. Only question now is whether we nail him for one murder or two."

CHAPTER 10.

Epistrophy I wasn't expecting the NYPD to give me a medal for finding the murderer of an undercover cop. And they didn't disappoint. I got zip.

Madder fack, as I'd once heard a TV evangelist say, they appeared to be p.i.s.sed at me for showing that Sig's death had nothing to do with the investigation he and Leman were part of. The killing of poor Sig/Charlie was motivated by nothing more conspiratorial than unrequited love ... jealousy. Diego's formal confession had stated that he never knew Sig was a cop until the night he killed him, when he'd discovered Sig's ID taped to his leg holster.

As for the world's nastiest civil servant, Detective Leman Sweet, he seemed even more eager to get shed of me than I was him. After Diego was behind bars-his room on Rivington Street swept clean of all the sicko bondage magazines and his pitifully inchoate love letters to Inge-I had tried to talk to Sweet about the crazed chain of events that had linked us all. But he was resolutely not interested. The days went by. And the autumn weather turned the leaves to flame. There were no more mystery calls summoning me up blind alleys. No white girls shoving pistols up my nose. And, to be sure, no Henry Valokus.

He and whoever it was he was working with, working for, or running from, had obviously determined I wasn't a player in their game. For which I had only to be grateful. And so I tried to bury the Rhode Island Red business as deep as the dead leaves of those first yellow roses.

If only I played the sax half as well as I played the fool. Ah, I could only try. Jefferson, my coach, said I was making progress even if I didn't know it yet. I kept to the street gig, though, and that along with the few bucks coming in from the translation work I did for an avant-garde French publishing house kept me afloat.

Not to mention the help I got from Walt. He never knew what a beacon in the darkness he was for me. Oh, our carnal thing was still in place, but that wasn't the main thing for me anymore. After all this time, I found out I could sort of talk to Walter about things-sort of. He tried to listen a little when I talked about Verlaine and I tried to listen when he worried aloud about the coming merger at work or b.i.t.c.hed about the snotty f.a.g at the tie counter at Barney's.

I needed a subst.i.tute ear these days because, as of late, Aubrey was powerfully distracted. By something I couldn't blame her for: my girl was in love.

I'd never seen Aubrey goofy before. Up until then, I thought her const.i.tutionally incapable of it. But there she was-acting goofy. It was fifty percent treat and fifty percent pain in the a.s.s. But she had my patience and indulgence coming to her, given all the dumb crushes and mad affaires de cur she'd nursed me through over the years.

Her man was named Jeremy. He was tall, slender, fall down dead gorgeous, black as night-and British! And every time he dropped a consonant or called her "luv", she just about came in her jumpsuit.

Jeremy was actually more suitable for me. Yeah, I know how trifling that makes me sound. All I mean is, in a parallel universe, he and I probably would have got down immediately, as if preordained to do so. Jeremy was a working cla.s.s genius who went to Oxford and now made his living as a music critic-everything from Schoenberg to Hendrix. But his pa.s.sion was jazz. He was quick and hip and worldly and traveled and charming. He had taken time off from his music magazine job to write a book on Fletcher Henderson and was in New York relaxing after having turned a first draft over to his editor.

Lucky for the lovers, we were in this universe, where Jeremy had walked into the Emporium one night in the company of a friend of his (a drag queen who calls herself Velveeta) and had taken one look at Aubrey and ... Well, it makes me rethink who was predestined to be with who. Lord, were they hot together, Aubrey and Jeremy. And it was out there for everybody to see. I was truly happy for her.

One of Jeremy's paychecks which had been waylaid for weeks finally arrived. He wanted to celebrate. So he invited Walt and me to join him and Aubrey at a posh supper club uptown where a pianist he knew was performing.

Didn't exactly sound like my scene, a stodgy, rip-off East Side boite. An ungracious Walter put it best, perhaps: the grub's gonna stink and we gonna be the stone only n.i.g.g.e.rs in the place.

It didn't help matters that he and Aubrey did not get along. But I went to work on him; and when the appointed evening rolled around, after he had diddled me nicely in the shower and fought me for a place in front of my full length mirror, Walt was brushing off his latest finery and pestering me to finish my make-up. We were only ten minutes late arriving.

Aubrey had never been a heavy drinker. But she was doing margaritas that night, just to keep pace with Jeremy, who had an apparent fondness for hundred proof Absolut. "Vodka, Nan?" he offered when Walter and I slid into their booth. Only he p.r.o.nounced it "vodker."

"Why not, old bean?" I accepted.

I had spent time with Jeremy on two occasions before that night. He and Walter, however, had never met. First off, Walter was floored by the accent. It was almost as if he didn't believe that was Jeremy's real voice. No real black man could sound like that, he seemed to believe. But as we all drank and began to relax, the two men seemed to be stumbling their way onto common ground. It was only when Walt starting talking basketball that he lost Jeremy, who sat through Walt's breathless recitations of Patrick Ewing's stats in dead silence.

"Never went in much for sports," Jeremy said finally. "I was a wash at football. Don't mind skiing once in a while though."

Walter looked at me in a kind of horror, then at Aubrey, and finally back at Jeremy, who, Walt had plainly decided, was a Martian.

In the quietly tasteful, tastefully quiet room, Aubrey erupted with raucous laughter. Then she turned to her beloved and kissed him on the mouth. "You know, Jeremy, Nan's a writer too," she said when that was finished. "They published something she wrote about Remy."

"Remy? Who's that, luv?"

"Rimbaud," I explained. "It was in the world's littlest little magazine."

"Smashing. I've got a soft spot for the surrealists myself. Mate of mine wrote a book about Robert Desnos, you know-the poet who survived Buchenwald."

I thought I heard Walter groan just then. But he needn't have worried. What promised to be a highly effete conversation was cut short when Jeremy's friend, pianist Brad Weston, took his seat.

The trio led by Weston was good, d.a.m.n good. I could tell by the crisp solemnity of the chords introducing Maiden Voyage that they would be. There followed a heartbreaking version of I'll Be Seeing You. And Weston's solo on My Foolish Heart quite literally made me cry. If his mission was to b.u.m out this crowd, he was succeeding brilliantly.

When the set was over and the applause had abated, the pianist headed over to our table.

"Trriffick set, mate-trrifick!" Jeremy said, standing to greet him. "Wife didn't leave you or anything, did she?"

Weston smiled a little and shook his head.

Jeremy made the introductions and Walt, Aubrey, and I supplied the compliments. After a few moments of small talk with us, the pianist pushed his scotch aside and removed his eyegla.s.ses in order to ma.s.sage his temple.

"Headache?" Jeremy asked him.

He shook his head. "No, no, man. I'm just tired. I went to a funeral today and it just wasted me. It was so ... terrible ... so sad and terrible."

"Who died?"

"Old cat. He was a trumpeter. Died of a stroke. They collected money at the union hall to bury him. Name was Heywood Tuttle. Ever hear of him?"

Jeremy shook his head. "I can't place him. The name rings some kind of bell though, however faint."

"Faint is about right, man. Couldn't have been more than ten people at the cat's funeral. It's like he fell through a hole in life, you know. Good musician. Played most of his life up in Providence. I think he gigged once or twice with Bird, as a matter of fact. But he was on junk a lot of the time. Got busted a lot and spent years in the joint.

"By the time he got to New York he was too old to be a junkie. He was just another wino, I guess. Pitiful. I saw him once in a while around Times Square. He was begging for quarters. Playing a d.a.m.n harmonica and looking like something from the circus. G.o.d, I hated seeing him like that. I gave him ten bucks.

"The guy that collected the bread for the funeral told me Tuttle had been flopping at a tenement over by the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. An old man like that stuck in all those fumes. Sick. Choking. Forgotten. Like he never gave a thing to the world. Can you imagine that?"

Yes, I could.

If n.o.body else could, I could.

He was talking about Wild Bill! Oh Jesus.

So Wild Bill-or Heywood Tuttle-was from Providence. From Rhode Island! New England. Like Henry Valokus and that "family" he was said to be part of.

So Wild Bill had some connection, however fleeting, to Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker was Henry's raison d'tre, or so he had claimed.

So Rhode Island Red wasn't a thing but a person. Tuttle himself was Rhode Island Red-right? But how was it possible that burned out, bad-tempered little Wild Bill had been the cause of all the death and mayhem?

And then, what had the kidnapping episode been about? Why did those idiots go to such lengths to get me to stop talking about Rhode Island Red? And why hadn't they killed me if shutting me up was so important?

And what did any of it have to do with Henry Valokus?

I couldn't answer a single one of those questions-yet.

This had all the elements of a film student's low budget homage to G.o.dard-a saintly blind girl; a carful of killers; a brutal policeman and a cast of doppelgngers. Everybody had been leading a double life. There were two Sigs, two Wild Bills, two Henrys. I had tried to get them all out of my mind and my heart, but they just would not stay dead for me. Back they came, like a song.

The waste of the whole situation was devastating. Wild Bill, once a good musician, his vitality drained, lost to junk or juice, along with his talent and his pride. Siggy, barely thirty years old, murdered horribly. Diego, friendless and little more than a boy, who'd likely spend the remainder of his life in prison. Henry, who might or might not actually be dead but who was just as lost to me one way as the other.

I must have turned sickly green. Because Aubrey and Jeremy, Brad Weston and Walter were all looking at me with fear and concern. I tried to tell them I was okay, but they hustled me out of there and into a taxi.

No, I couldn't help thinking about the waste. And I couldn't help thinking I had to be the one to put a stop to it. But first I had to understand it.

CHAPTER 11.

Straight, no chaser I recall vividly the first time I was allowed to study in the magnificent main Manhattan library all on my own. I was eleven years old, too cool to go over and pet the lions, but wildly in love with them, secretly. Daddy had dropped me off that morning-school was on spring hiatus-with lunch money and threats to my life if I dared leave the reading room and go traipsing unaccompanied across Forty-second Street. I was doing big time research for my paper on j.a.panese poetry, thinking of making a living as a haiku poet.

The library had fallen into awful disrepair in my lifetime, the grime and neglect all but burying its majesty. But a major renovation effort over the past three years or so has restored its grandeur. And now, not only does the facade gleam and the lions stand proudly, the park behind it is splendidly kept as well; not one but two lovely cafes have opened-one on either side of the stairs leading up to the entrance; and high atop the building there is a grand style restaurant, with prices to match, from which you can look down into the stacks of the circulating library! A bit much, maybe. But on the whole I approve.

I could have gone to NYU, or borrowed a card from a friend with library privileges up at Columbia But I figured the public library to be a much better bet for the kind of research I needed to do-nothing arcane, like images of water in the poems of Basho. No. More like pop culture.

"V" as in "Valokus." There was nothing so difficult about that. I was trying to treat the Henry Valokus mystery like a paper I had absolutely no heart for but knew I'd have to tackle before the semester was over.

Who was it who first glamorized the image of the mobster? Was it old Hollywood? Was it Al Capone? Scott Fitzgerald with Gatsby's bootlegging? The mob in all its sundry manifestations seems to be the source of ongoing, inexhaustible fascination. More books get published about gangsters than about women in rotten marriages, which is saying something.