I turned and gave Cressi a complicated series of instructions. “Keep your mouth shut till you’re bailed out, Peter. You got that?”

“What you think, I’m an idiot here?”

“I’m not the one buying guns from cops. Just do as I say and then meet me at my office tomorrow morning so we can figure out where to go from here. And be sure to bring my usual retainer.”

“I always do.”

“I’ll give you that, Peter.” I looked back up to the blonde woman who was still watching us. “You know her?” I asked with a flick of my head to the gallery.

He looked up. “Nah, she’s not my type, a scrag like that.”

“Then if you don’t know her and I don’t know her, why’s she staring?”

He smiled. “When you look and dress like I do, you know, you get used to it.”

“That must be it,” I said. “I bet you’ll look even more dashing in your orange jumpsuit.”

Just then a bailiff grabbed Cressi’s arm and started leading him back to the holding cell.

“See if you can stay out of trouble until tomorrow morning,” I said to him as the Commissioner read out another in his endless list of names.

But Cressi was wrong about in whom the blonde was interested. She was waiting outside the Roundhouse for me. “Mr. Carl?”

“That’s right.”

“Your office said I could find you here.”

“And here I am,” I said with a tight smile. It was not a moment poised with promise, her standing before me just then. She was in her mid-twenties, small, her bleached hair hacked to ear’s length, as if with a cleaver. Black lipstick, black nail polish, mascara globbed around her eyes like a cry for help. Under her black leather was a blue work shirt, originally the property of some stiff named Lenny, and a thrift-shop-quality pleated skirt. She had five earrings in her right ear and her left nostril was pierced and she looked like one of those impoverished art students who hang outside the Chinese buy-it-by-the-pound buffet on Chestnut Street.