Hal Gabriel had lived on West End Avenue at Ninety-second Street. At the Two-four station house on West One Hundreth I sat across a desk from a young police officer named Michael Selig. He was still in his twenties and already losing his hair, and he had the anxious look of the prematurely bald. "This all ought to be on computer," he said of Gabriel's file. "We're working our way back, getting our old files copied, but it takes forever."

Gabriel, forty-six, married but separated from his wife, had been found hanging in his eighth-floor apartment on a weekday afternoon in October 1981. He had evidently stood on a chair, looped a leather belt around his neck, wedged the tongue of the belt between the top of his closet door and the doorjamb, and kicked the chair over.

"High blood alcohol," Selig said.

"No note."

"They don't always leave a note, do they? Especially when they get drunk and start feeling sorry for themselves. Look at this- he estimates death as having occurred five to seven days before discovery of the body. Must have been ripe, huh?"

"That's why they broke in."

"Didn't have to, it says here the super had a key. Woman across the hall noticed the smell."

She'd also told the investigating officers that Gabriel had seemed despondent since his wife's departure several years earlier, that his only visitors had been delivery boys from the liquor store and the Chinese restaurant. He'd worked up until two months of his death, managing a film lab in the West Forties, but had been out of work since then.

"Most likely drank himself out of the job," Selig offered.