‘And you get mixed up in a cop beating for fifty bucks?’

‘Maybe Jo-Jo’s already dead,’ I said. ‘Damn it, Marty, I can’t even buy that. All he had to do was go to the cops. They’d have had a cop mugger so fast no one would have noticed Jo-Jo.’

‘So what are you going to do? You decided to be a private cop.’

‘I decided to eat,’ I said. ‘A private cop was the only experience I had to sell around here. If I went back to sea, who would take care of you?’

‘The way you take care of me you could have picked up coins in the street. But go ahead, worry about who would take care of me. I like you to worry about that.’

‘You sound like you want me to make you honest.’

‘Maybe I’m getting domestic,’ she said. ‘Or just tired.’

‘That’ll do it,’ I said, ‘and don’t scare me.’

‘Would it scare you so much?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘and that’s the part that really scares me. I might even like it.’

‘I wish I could put your arm back,’ Marty said.

She was lying there in the dark of the big room, smiling at me from the far end of the couch. Face to face ten feet apart with our legs touching. I touched her leg with my hand. She sipped her martini.

‘No one can put back what’s missing, but you put me back into the world,’ I said.

‘Is that what I do?’

She does. Sometimes Marty is the only reason I can think of for getting out of bed in the morning. Sometimes even Marty isn’t reason enough. I get out of bed anyway. There is a very big question in that fact somewhere.

‘Let’s go to bed,’ she said.

It takes a one-armed man longer to undress. Marty’s bedroom is large, and the bed is king-sized. There is a radio on the bed table and a TV set for watching when she is alone. A neon sign in the street below blinks red and yellow most of the night. Marty likes the blinking sign below, and she likes the noise of a jukebox that filters up.