“Let’s say you’re right. What would that tell us? We already know Sladek was poisoned.”

“It tells us how it happened.”

“And…?”

“And now we can get the bastard who did it.”

“What do you want to do, arrest everyone who buys a pack of Chrome Golds?”

The detective didn’t have an answer to that.

“Then what? All we can do is keep cleaning up after the guy and hope that one of these days he’ll try his stunt on the wrong person and get himself shot.”

“No one’s going to shoot a nice old guy who’s offering them a cigarette.”

“You don’t know that,” the partner said. “This is New York.”

He sat with a blue knit hat pulled down over his forehead, his hands crammed under his armpits, shivering. Even with two shirts on, he was cold. He had a thin blanket, which he had wrapped and rewrapped around himself, trying to make it hold in as much heat as possible. Under the blanket he had a thermos filled with coffee. Every few minutes he took a swallow.

People passed, hurrying from store to store, from home to theater, from street to taxi. He only saw their legs, their hands swinging by their sides, their packages. Sometimes children passed at his eye level and then he saw adult hands snatch the curious faces away from him. He saw car tires and bicycle wheels. As it got later, he saw less and less. By midnight, he saw nothing but a neon sign across the street and patches of sidewalk, dimly lit in the glow of street lamps.

The doorway he sat in, the entrance to a Burger King that was closed for renovation, was relatively roomy: He was able to stretch his legs almost to their full length. Each night for the previous ten he had sat in a different doorway, on a different street. Unlike Harold Sladek, he was not driven by years of habit. But this doorway was more comfortable than the others had been, and that really did make a difference. He started thinking about staying here, at least for the next few nights.