“Calm down.”

“I was talking to him last night,” the detective said. “He was sitting next to me, smoking a goddamn cigarette, telling me what a wonderful night it was.”

“You couldn’t have known,” his partner said.

“Sure I could have. I could have figured it out then instead of now. I could have saved his life.”

“We don’t know that.” The partner stopped the car outside Body Beautiful.

The detective got out and walked to the service entrance. The issue of Cosmopolitan was still lying where he had dropped it, crumpled in a dark corner of the doorway. It had dried and hardened and was now stuck to the ground. The detective used a scraper to get it up. Underneath it there was a cigarette butt.

“Bingo.” The detective picked the butt up with a pair of tweezers and dropped it in an evidence baggie. He returned to the car. “I told you there was a cigarette.”

“There are cigarettes on every sidewalk in the city.”

“That’s true, and maybe this one has nothing to do with our case. But I don’t think so. I think that Harold Sladek smoked it. Why? Because the first time we saw it, it was lying on top of that magazine, and the magazine was lying behind his body. Do you think someone came along, smoking, finished his cigarette, and then tossed it over Sladek’s dead body so that it landed on his magazine? I don’t think so.”

“Okay.”

“So: Sladek smoked it. That still doesn’t mean it has something to do with our case. But since we didn’t find any cigarettes in his bags, or even an empty cigarette pack, we can assume that someone else gave the cigarette to him. And we know that someone gave a cigarette to Michael Casey just before he died. And it was the same brand as this one.” He waved the bag in front of his partner’s face.

“Lots of people smoke Chrome Golds.”

“Sure. And lots of homeless people die on the streets. But how many do one right after doing the other? I’ll bet that if we analyze this butt, we’ll find traces of the same poison they found in Sladek’s body.”