The man made the mistake of trying to push past the officer. He was met with a stiff, one-handed shove that nearly knocked him down.

"Hey!" Camel's hair said. "I live here."

"This is a crime scene," the cop replied. His tone promised all kinds of pain. "Go and take your daughter to a coffee shop, or a hotel."

"Who the hell do you think you are?" the outraged john shouted.

The girl grabbed his arm and whispered something in his ear.

"But I live here."

She murmured something else.

"No. No, I want to be with you."

She touched his cheek.

"Mr. McGill?"

A black woman in her late twenties, wearing a neat black uniform, had come out from behind her sadistic senior. She had some kind of rank but wasn't yet a sergeant. We stood eye-to-eye.

"Yes?"

"Lieutenant Bonilla asked me to come and get you."

There was something in the woman's gaze that was… curious.

"Thank you."

She turned. I followed.

"Where the hell is he going?" the angry resident hollered. "How can he go in and you keep us out here in the street?"

"Listen, mister," the big-bellied cop said. "You'll have to-"

The glass door shut behind us and I couldn't hear any more of what transpired. But even though I was cut off from the dialogue I knew its beginning-and its end.

The man had met the woman in some quasi-legal club, probably in an outer borough. They'd done a few lines of coke and come to an agreement on a price; he probably had to pay part or all of that sum before she got into the car service that brought them to the crime-scene apartment building. But she'd leave soon because the hard-on in the john's pants was also pressing on his good judgment. Pretty soon the cop on the door would lose his temper and use the phone to call for backup. The girl would fade into the night and the man would go to jail for interfering with a police investigation.