'I thought they grew a lot of coffee.'

'That's probably a front. Where was I? The point is, the father turns up dead a month later in whatever's the capital of Colombia. He crossed somebody and he ran for it, and they wound up getting him in Colombia, but first they killed his kids and his wife. See, the Colombians, they play by a different set of rules. You f.u.c.k with them and they don't just kill you. They wipe out your whole family. Kids, any age, it don't matter. You got a dog and a cat and some tropical fish, they're dead too.'

'Jesus.'

'The Mafia was always considerate about family. They'd even make sure to arrange a hit so your family wouldn't be there to see it happen. Now we got criminals that kill the whole family. Nice?'

'Jesus.'

He put his palms on the table for leverage, hoisted himself to his feet. 'I'm getting this round,' he announced. 'I don't need some pimp payin' for my drinks.'

Back at the table he said, 'He's your client, right? Chance?' When I failed to respond he said, 'Well, s.h.i.t, you met with him last night. He wanted to see you, and now you got a client that you won't say his name. Two and two's gotta be four, doesn't it?'

'I can't tell you how to add it.'

'Let's just say I'm right and he's your client. For the sake of argument. You won't be givin' nothin' away.'

'All right.'

He leaned forward. 'He killed her,' he said. 'So why would he hire you to investigate it?'

'Maybe he didn't kill her.'

'Oh, sure he did.' He dismissed the possibility of Chance's innocence with a wave of his hand. 'She says she's quitting him and he says okay and the next day she's dead. Come on, Matt. What's that if it's not cut and dried?'

'Then we get back to your question. Why'd he hire me?'

'Maybe to take the heat off.'

'How?'

'Maybe he'll figure we'll figure he must be innocent or he wouldn't have hired you.'

'But that's not what you figured at all.'

'No.'

'You think he'd really think that?'

'How do I know what some c.o.ked-up spade pimp is gonna think?'

'You figure he's a c.o.kehead?'

'He's got to spend it on something, doesn't he? It's not gonna go for country-club dues and a box at the charity ball. Lemme askyou something.'

'Go ahead.'

'You think there's a chance in the world he didn't kill her? Or set her up and hire it done?'

'I think there's a chance.'

'Why?'

'For one thing, he hired me. And it wasn't to take the heat off because what heat are we talking about? You already said there wasn't going to be any heat. You're planning to clear the case and work on something else.'

'He wouldn't necessarily know that.'

I let that pa.s.s. 'Take it from another angle,' I suggested. 'Let's say I never called you.'

'Called me when?'

'The first call I made. Let's say you didn't know she was breaking with her pimp.'

'If we didn't get it from you we'd of gotten it somewhere else.'

'Where? Kim was dead and Chance wouldn't volunteer the information. I'm not sure anybody else in the world knew.' Except for Elaine, but I wasn't going to bring her into it. 'I don't think you'd have gotten it. Not right off the bat, anyway.'

'So?'

'So how would you have figured the killing then?'

He didn't answer right away. He looked down at his near-empty gla.s.s, and a couple of vertical frown lines creased his forehead. He said, 'I see what you mean.'

'How would you have pegged it?'

'The way we did before you called. A psycho. You know we're not supposed to call 'em that anymore? There was a departmental directive went out about a year ago. From now on we don't call 'em psychos. From now on it's EDPs.'

'What's an EDP?'

'Emotionally Disturbed Person. That's what some a.s.shole on Centre Street's got nothing better to worry about. The whole city's up to its a.s.s in more nuts than a fruitcake and our first priority is how we refer to them. We don't want to hurt their feelings. No, I'd figure a psycho, some new version of Jack the Ripper. Calls up a hooker, invites her over, chops her up.'

'And if it was a psycho?'

'You know what happens then. You hope you get lucky with a piece of physical evidence. In this case fingerprints were hopeless, it's a transient hotel room, there's a million latents and no place to start with them. Be nice if there was a big b.l.o.o.d.y fingerprint and you knew it belonged to the killer, but we didn't have that kind of luck.'

'Even if you did - '

'Even if we did, a single print wouldn't lead anywhere. Not until we had a suspect. You can't get a make from Washington on a single print. They keep saying you're gonna be able to eventually, but - '

'They've been saying that for years.'

'It'll never happen. Or it will, but I'll have my six years by then and I'll be in Arizona. Barring physical evidence that leads somewhere, I guess we'd be waiting for the nut to do it again. You get another couple of cases with the same MO and sooner or later he f.u.c.ks up and you got him, and then you match him to some latents in the room at the Galaxy and you wind up with a case.' He drained his gla.s.s. 'Then he plea bargains his way to manslaughter and he's out in three years tops and he does it again, but I don't want to get started on that again. I honest to Christ don't want to get started on that again.'

I bought our next round. Any compunctions he had about having a pimp's money pay for his booze seemed to have been dissolved by the same alcohol that had given rise to them. He was visibly drunk now, but only if you knew where to look. The eyes had a glaze on them, and there was a matching glaze on his whole manner. He was holding up his end of a typical alcoholic conversation, wherein two drunks take polite turns talking aloud to their own selves.

I wouldn't have noticed this if I'd been matching him drink for drink. But I was sober, and as the booze got to him I felt the gulf widening between us.

I tried to keep the conversation on the subject of Kim Dakkinen but it wouldn't stay there. He wanted to talk about everything that was wrong with New York.