“That’s more noise than I made all night,” I said.

“Look, Bernie-”

“Maybe they meant the apartment above this one. Maybe the woman was English. They figure floors differently over there. They call the first floor the ground floor, see, so what they call the third floor would be the floor three flights up, which you and I would call the fourth floor, and-”

“Jesus.”

I looked at Loren, then back at Ray again.

“What are you, crazy? You want me to read you your rights and all so you’ll remember you’re a criminal caught in the act? What the hell’s got into you, Bernie?”

“It’s just that I just got here. And I never made a sound.”

“So maybe a cat knocked a plant off a shelf in the apartment next door and we just got lucky and came here by mistake. It’s still you and us, right?”

“Right.” I smiled what certainly ought to have been a rueful smile. “You got lucky, all right. I’m nice and fat tonight.”

“That so?”

“Very fat.”

“Interesting,” Ray said.

“You got the key from the doorman?”

“Uh-huh. He wanted to come up and let us in but we told him he ought to stay at his post.”

“So nobody actually knows I’m here but you two.”

The two of them looked at each other. They were a nice contrast, Ray in his lived-in uniform, Loren all young and neat and freshly laundered. “That’s true,” Ray said. “Far as it goes.”

“Oh?”

“This’d be a very good collar for us. Me’n Loren, we could use a good collar. Might get a commendation out of it.”

“Oh, come on,” I said.

“Always possible.”

“The hell it is. You didn’t nail me on your own initiative. You followed up a radio squawk. Nobody’s going to pin a medal on you.”

“Well, you got a point there,” Ray said. “What do you think, Loren?”

“Well,” Loren said, slapping the stick against his palm and nibbling thoughtfully on his lower lip. The stick was beat up and scratched in contrast to the rest of his outfit. I had the feeling he dropped it often, and on surfaces more abrasive than Chinese carpets.