In the following weeks he'd go back to the club where he'd met her, wanting either the money he'd laid out already or the sex that money had paid for. If his luck changed he wouldn't find her.

THE YOUNG OFFICER BROUGHT me to an elevator and pushed a button for the sixth floor. My heart sank a little then. Irrationally I'd hoped that the crime had nothing to do with my mission.

I wondered if Sam Strange, or even Rinaldo himself, was setting me up for something far more sinister than a talk.

"So you're the infamous Leonid Trotter McGill," the woman cop said. She had a heart-shaped face and a smile that her father loved.

"You've heard about me?"

"They say you've got your finger in every dishonest business in the city."

"And still," I said, "I struggle to make the rent each month. How do I do it?"

Her smile broadened to admit men other than blood relatives.

"They also say that you beat a man twice your size to death just a few months ago."

I saw no reason to call into question a growing mythology.

We were passing the fifth floor.

"How old are you?" she asked.

"Old enough to know better," I said, and the door to the small chamber slid open onto a dingy, claustrophobically narrow hallway.

THERE WERE AT LEAST a dozen uniformed cops and plainclothes detectives standing in and outside of apartment 6H. The woman who brought us there led me past two unwilling uniforms at the door, down a small pink entrance hall, and into a modest living room replete with fifties furniture in baby blue, chrome, and faded red.

"Leonid McGill," newly promoted homicide detective Bethann Bonilla said. It was neither a greeting nor an accusation; just a statement like an infant might make, mouthing a phrase and learning about it at the same time.

Before responding I took in the murder scene.

Equidistant between the baby-blue couch, kitchenette, and window lay the corpse of a blond woman in a brown robe that had opened, probably at the time of her death. The window looked out on the buildings across the street. The dead woman was certainly young at the time of her demise, she might have been pretty. It was hard to tell because half of her face had been shot off.