“You’re seeing her tonight?”

She shook her head. “Tonight I’ll hit the bars. A couple of drinks, a couple of laughs, and maybe I’ll get lucky. It’s been known to happen.”

“Be careful.”

She looked at me. “You be careful,” she said.

A couple of subway trains whisked me home, where I changed to nylon shorts and running shoes and ducked out for a quick half hour in Riverside Park. It was mid September, with the New York City Marathon a little over a month away, and the park was thick with runners. Some of them were of my stripe, the casual sort who knocked off three or four sluggish miles three or four times a week. Others were in marathon training, grinding out fifty or sixty or seventy miles a week, and for them it was Serious Business.

It was thus for Wally Hemphill, but he was following a program of alternate short and long runs, and the night’s agenda called for four miles so we wound up keeping each other company. Wallace Riley Hemphill was a recently divorced lawyer in his early thirties who didn’t look old enough to have been married in the first place. He’d grown up somewhere in eastern Long Island and was now living on Columbus Avenue and dating models and actresses and (puff puff) training for the Marathon. He had his own one-man practice with an office in the West Thirties, and as we ran he talked about a woman who’d asked him to represent her in a divorce action.

“And I went ahead and drew up papers,” he told me, “and it developed that this dizzy bitch wasn’t married in the first place. She wasn’t even living with anybody, didn’t even have a boyfriend. But she has a history of this. Every once in a while something snaps inside her and she finds an attorney and institutes divorce proceedings.”

I told him about my book thief who specialized in libraries. He was shocked. “Stealing from libraries? You mean there are people who would do that?”