"Goddamn," said Fulton, shaking his head and grinning, showing his gold tooth, "our little Butch's really gonna do it. A long time, the two of us."

"Yeah, eleven years. Dr. Fulton's College of Criminal Knowledge for green-ass prosecutors. I would've sunk like a stone, you hadn't grabbed me by the shorts."

"Mooney McPhail."

Karp smiled. "Yeah, Mooney McPhail. An easy grounder to short and I bobbled it."

"You were second seating for Joe Lerner."

"Right, another blast from the past. He's in on this too, by the way, the MLK side. I had a witness said she saw Mooney use the knife, and picked him out of the lineup. That was the case. Holy shit! What a fuckup!"

"Only she didn't. It was her sister saw it and she told-what the hell was her name?-Esther, Ethyl?"

"Methyl," said Karp.

"Methyl, right. She got the whole story from the sister and she decided to be the witness, because the sister had the arth-a-ritis."

"Yeah, it would've been a classic, if it'd come out on cross. Defense would've asked, 'Did you actually observe this with your own eyes,' and old Methyl would've said, 'Oh, no, my sister told me the whole story and she don't lie.' Case dismissed."

Fulton laughed. "Turned out the sister didn't see it either. Took me a month to find the girl who told the sister… Damn!"

"What?"

"It just flashed on me, where I was."

"What, when you found the witness?"

"No, where I was when I found out about Kennedy. I was up on St. Nick, up around 'forty-third, making a collar. Some pimp cut a girl. I was a detective second out of the Two-eight.