Plain dipped into a jacket pocket and took out an orange-cove red notebook and flipped it open. "I got to the party a little after ten o'clockas close as I can put it, about ten minutes after ten. Before that, starting at about eight o'clock, I'd been at the New French Cafe with friends. The friends were"

He listed the friends. In the next five minutes, he gave a nearly minute-by-minute account of his evening, with each friend he encountered along the way.

What about Sandy Lansing?

Plain shook his head. "I don't know. If I saw a picture of her, maybe I'd recognize her, but I don't recognize the name. The party was open to a particular crowd."

"What crowd?"

"The art-money hip crowd," Plain said.

"Any dope around?"

"All over the goddamn place."

"You use drugs?" Sloan asked it mildly enough, but there was a snake in the question, which everyone could see. Plain did not hesitate.

"No. I don't use any chemicals. I did, for two years, when I was a teenager. I used cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, ecstasy, LSD, peyote, marijuana, alcohol, nicotine, and a couple of other things. Hypnotics. Quaaludes. I found out that each and every one of them made me stupider than I already was, and I decided I couldn't afford that. So, eleven years ago, I stopped."

"Aspirin?" Lucas asked. A little sarcasm.

"I still use aspirin and ibuprofen. I'm not a moron." His tone of voice showed no reaction to the sarcasm, and somehow left Lucas feeling that the sarcasm had been juvenile. Plain was ahead on points.

"So what happened next?" Sloan asked.

At about midnight, Plain said, he left the party at Sallance Hanson's and went back to his studio in St. Paul's Lowertown with a friend, Sandy Smith, where they met an employee, James Graf, to look at scanned negatives from that mornings photo shoot. After half an hour of looking at the negs, Smith left for his home while Plain and Graf continued to work with the negatives.