Sloan was waiting in the back of the Homicide office, talking with a tall dark-haired man with black eyes, who might have been called slender except that he had a square-shouldered heft that made him too tough for the word; he could have played a dissolute biker in a rock 'n' roll movie. He was wearing a black leather jacket, black slacks, and a plain black T-shirt. Another man, fleshy, brown-haired, freckled, wearing a Star Wars Crew baseball hat and a single silver earring, sat sideways in a hard-back chair a few feet away.

Sloan saw Lucas coming and said, "Chief Davenport, this is Amnon Plain. He was at the party last night and agreed to come to talk with us."

The dark-haired man nodded at Lucas and the brown-haired man said, "Get a lawyer, dude."

Plain asked Lucas, "Do I need one? A lawyer?"

Lucas shrugged. "I don't know. Did you kill Alie'e?"

"No." Nothing more; no explanation of why he wouldn't have, or couldn't have, or a protest at the question.

Lucas said, "If you've got a simple and convincing story, then there shouldn't be a problem. If there are ambiguities to your statement then maybe you ought to get a lawyer."

Plain looked at the brown-haired man, who said, "Do what the dude says. Get a lawyer."

Plain looked back at Lucas, then at Sloan, then back to Lucas, and said, "Fuck a lawyer. But I want to make my own tape of the statement. I brought a recorder."

"No problem," Lucas said.

Plain asked if the brown-haired man could come along, and Lucas, looked at Sloan, who shrugged. "I'd rather not"

"Get a lawyer," said the brown-haired man.

" but if he doesn't get involved" Sloan continued. "Come on along," Lucas said.

They took the statement in an interview room, with three tape recorders on the table: two police recorders, backing each other up, and Plains hand-sized Sony.

Sloan had gone into good-cop mode, and said, pleasantly, "If you'll just tell us where you were and what you did, and who you saw last night."