There were plainclothes detectives standing on either side of me. I pretended that they were straphangers and I was taking the A train at rush hour.

"What was the name of the person she wanted to find?"

"She didn't say and I didn't ask. I figured we'd get down to details when I arrived."

The detective's Spanish eyes bored into me. I noticed that she'd trimmed her black mane but decided that this was not the moment to talk about hairstyles.

"And what are you doing here?" she asked again.

"I just told you."

"Don't get me wrong, Mr. McGill, but you don't seem like the kind of guy who would come into a room where your profit had been cut short."

"I didn't know when I was downstairs what had happened. My client might have been alive. For all I knew the crime was unrelated to my business. I still don't know. What's the victim's name?"

The lieutenant smiled.

I hunched my shoulders.

"What else did this Laura Brown tell you?"

"Not a thing. She said that someone had recommended me but she didn't give a name. That's not unusual. People don't like me thinking about them, I've found. I can't understand why."

"Did she mention anyone?"

"No."

Bonilla squinted and, in doing so, came to a decision.

"We figure the guy for being the shooter," she said, "but there's no gun in evidence. She certainly didn't stab him."

"Anyone hear shots?"

Bonilla shook her head slightly.

"Wow," I said. I meant it. A hit man with a silencer getting killed with a kitchen utensil seconds after he makes his bones.

At that moment I really hated Alphonse Rinaldo.

4

When I was maybe five, my father, an autodidact Communist, took me down to Chinatown. He was always trying to teach me lessons about life. That day he bought me a woven finger-trap. I pressed my fingers in from either side of the bamboo tube at his request.