I felt like walking out, but I stayed where I was and got caught up in the film in spite of myself. The film had a neat twist. At the end, with Bogart arrested for murder, it turns out that the Legion was set up by the crime syndicate for commercial purposes. Maybe they had a stranglehold on the hood-and-sheet business. They want Bogart to plead self-defense, but for the sake of his wife’s reputation he turns state’s evidence instead, bringing down the whole Black Legion and saving the day for truth and justice.

Even so, he winds up with a life sentence. The poor son of a bitch, he must have had the worst lawyer since Patty Hearst.

Don’t ask me why, but I went across the street to make sure she wasn’t waiting for me over a cup of coffee. And of course she wasn’t. I scanned the room from the doorway, then left and went back to my place.

I called her number and wasn’t surprised when no one answered. I picked up what I’d come home for and went out again, taking the same combination of subways I take to work every morning but getting off a stop sooner than usual, at Broadway and Twenty-third. I just missed my crosstown bus and was all set to hail a cab, but what was my hurry?

I walked across Twenty-third Street and tried her number one last time from a pay phone two blocks from her apartment. When my quarter came back I walked the rest of the way and stood on the sidewalk across the street from her building. Simple Pleasures, the ground-floor shop, was closed and dark. There were no lights in the fourth-floor windows, but that didn’t tell me anything. Her apartment was in the back of the building.

I put my hand in my pocket, felt the burglar’s tools I’d gone home for. It seemed to me that I had no moral right to enter Ilona’s apartment. I evidently didn’t have much in the way of moral fiber, either, but I’d known that for years.