imagine some thug trying to grab our briefcases or us. I would chase him and dive for his ankles and knock him to the ground. I am five foot five and weigh 120 pounds, and I can run fast, and I'd show him, yes I would. I fantasized about what I would do if some psychopathic piece of garbage came up from behind us in the dark and suddenly…

"How's it going?" Esther asked.

"To tell you the truth…" I began, because I rarely told Esther the truth.

It was not my habit to admit to my agent or my publisher, Phyllis Grann, that I was ever frightened or uneasy about what I was doing. The two women were the big shots in my professional existence and had faith in me. If I said I had been investigating Jack the Ripper and knew who he was, they didn't doubt me for a moment.

"I'm miserable," I confessed, and I was so dismayed that I felt like crying.

"You are?" Esther's stop-for-nothing stride hesitated for a moment on Lexington Avenue. "You're miserable? Really? Why?"

"I hate this book, Esther. I don't know how the hell…All I did was look at his paintings and his life, and one thing led to another…"

She didn't say a word.

It has always been easier for me to get angry than to show fear or loss, and I was losing my life to Walter Richard Sickert. He was taking it away from me. "I want to write my novels," I said. "I don't want to write about him. There's no joy in this. None."

"Well, you know," she said very calmly as she resumed her pace, "you don't have to do it. I can get you out of it."

She could have gotten me out of it, but I could never have gotten myself out of it. I knew the identity of a murderer and I couldn't possibly avert my gaze. "I am suddenly in a position of judgment," I told Esther. "It doesn't matter if he's dead. Every now and then this small voice asks me, what if you're wrong? I would never forgive myself for saying such a thing about somebody, and then finding out I'm wrong."