WHEN I CAME home from the crime scene I sat on the couch in my living room, too weary and sick at heart to even take off my jacket or loosen my tie. I sat in the dark, and listened to my breathing, and felt a bleak hopelessness fall about my shoulders like an old familiar cloak.

My legal practice was failing for want of paying clients and my partner was thinking of bolting to greener pastures. My last love affair had ended badly, to say the least. I had been summoned to Traffic Court for a myriad of moving violations that were really, really not my fault. My mother, to whom I hadn’t spoken in a number of years, was drinking her life away in Arizona. My father was deathly ill, awaiting the operation that would prolong, but not save, his life. And worst of all, my cable had been cut off because I had fallen behind on my bill.

And now Joey Parma had come to me for legal advice and had ended up dead. We had met at La Vigna, at a table in the back. His eye had been swollen, his hands had been sweaty. And at that back table, just hours before his death, Joey Cheaps had given me something. It was something I didn’t want, something I had no use for, but he had given it to me all the same. He had given me a murder.

“This was twenty years ago,” said Joey Parma. He leaned forward, his voice was soft, he spoke out of the side of his mouth to ensure privacy. “An old buddy brought me in, told me to bring a bat, sos I did. Nothing was supposed to happen. Just a little rough-up, is all. Three hundred for a rough-up. Some guy. Tommy something. I never knowed beyond that. He was coming to a pier on the river with a suitcase. There was supposed to be a boat or something waiting. But before he got to the boat we was supposed to take the suitcase. We was supposed to take the suitcase and teach the guy a lesson at the same time.

“It was dark, deserted, cold as shit. The lights on the pier was out, but the moon was this bright thing in the sky.