I can't say where it took me because I slept like a dead man. If I dreamed at all I never knew about it. I awoke to the smells of coffee perking and bacon frying, showered, shaved with a disposable razor she'd laid out for me, then got dressed and joined her at a pine plank table in the kitchen. I drank orange juice and coffee and ate scrambled eggs and bacon and whole wheat muffins with peach preserves, and I couldn't remember when my appetite had been so keen.

There was a group that met Sunday afternoons a few blocks to the east of us, she informed me. She made it one of her regular meetings. Did I feel like joining her?

"I ought to do some work," I said.

"On a Sunday?"

"What's the difference?"

"Are you really going to be able to accomplish anything on a Sunday afternoon?"

I hadn't really accomplished anything since I'd started. Was there anything I could do today?

I got out my notebook, dialed Sunny's number. No answer. I called my hotel. Nothing from Sunny. Nothing from Danny Boy Bell or anyone else I'd seen last night. Well, Danny Boy would still be sleeping at this hour, and so might most of the others.

There was a message to call Chance. I started dialing his number, then stopped myself. If Jan was going to a meeting, I didn't want to sit around her loft waiting for him to call back. Her sponsor might not approve.

The meeting was on the second floor of a synagogue on Forsythe Street. You couldn't smoke there. It was an unusual experience being in an AA meeting that wasn't thick with cigarette smoke.

There were about fifty people there and she seemed to know most of them. She introduced me to several people, all of whose names I promptly forgot. I felt self-conscious, uncomfortable with the attention I was getting. My appearance didn't help, either. While I hadn't slept in my clothes, they looked as though I had, showing the effects of last night's fight in the alley.

And I was feeling the fight's effects, too. It wasn't until we left her loft that I realized how much I ached. My head was sore where I'd butted him and I had a bruise on one forearm and one shoulder was black and blue and ached. Other muscles hurt when I moved. I hadn't felt anything after the incident but all those aches and pains turn up the next day.

I got some coffee and cookies and sat through the meeting. It was all right. The speaker qualified very briefly, leaving the rest of the meeting for discussion. You had to raise your hand to get called on.

Fifteen minutes from the end, Jan raised her hand and said how grateful she was to be sober and how much of a role her sponsor played in her sobriety, how helpful the woman was when she had something bothering her or didn't know what to do. She didn't get more specific than that. I had a feeling she was sending me a message and I wasn't too crazy about that.

I didn't raise my hand.

Afterward she was going out with some people for coffee and asked me if I'd like to come along. I didn't want any more coffee and I didn't want company, either. I made an excuse.

Outside, before we went separate ways, she asked me how I felt. I said I felt all right.

"Do you still feel like drinking?"

"No," I said.

"I'm glad you called last night."

"So am I."

"Call anytime, Matthew. Even in the middle of the night if you have to."

"Let's hope I don't have to."

"But if you do, call. All right?"

"Sure."

"Matthew? Promise me one thing?"

"What?"

"Don't have a drink without calling me first."

"I'm not going to drink today."

"I know. But if you ever decide to, if you're going to, call me first. Promise?"

"Okay."

On the subway heading uptown I thought about the conversation and felt foolish for having made the promise. Well, it had made her happy. What was the harm in it if it made her happy?

There was another message from Chance. I called from the lobby, told his service I was back at my hotel. I bought a paper and took it upstairs with me to kill the time it took him to call back.

The lead story was a honey. A family in Queens- father, mother, two kids under five- had gone for a ride in their shiny new Mercedes. Someone pulled up next to them and emptied both barrels of a shotgun into the car, killing all four of them. A police search of their apartment in Jamaica Estates had revealed a large amount of cash and a quantity of uncut cocaine. Police theorized the massacre was drug related.

No kidding.

There was nothing about the kid I'd left in the alley. Well, there wouldn't be. The Sunday papers were already on the street when he and I encountered one another. Not that he'd be much likelier to make tomorrow's paper, or the next day's. If I'd killed him he might have earned a paragraph somewhere, but what was the news of a black youth with a pair of broken legs?

I was pondering that point when someone knocked on my door.

Funny. The maids have Sunday off, and the few visitors I get call from downstairs. I got my coat off the chair, took the.32 from the pocket. I hadn't gotten rid of it yet, or of the two knives I'd taken from my broken-legged friend. I carried the gun over to the door and asked who it was.

"Chance."

I dropped the gun in a pocket, opened the door. "Most people call," I said.

"The fellow down there was reading. I didn't want to disturb him."

"That was considerate."

"That's my trademark." His eyes were taking me in, appraising me. They left me to scan my room. "Nice place," he said.

The words were ironic but the tone of voice was not. I closed the door, pointed to a chair. He remained standing. "It seems to suit me," I said.

"I can see that. Spartan, uncluttered."

He was wearing a navy blazer and gray flannel slacks. No topcoat. Well, it was a little warmer today and he had a car to get around in.

He walked over to my window, looked out of it. "Tried you last night," he said.

"I know."

"You didn't call back."

"I didn't get the message until a little while ago and I wasn't where I could be reached."

"Didn't sleep here last night?"

"No."

He nodded. He had turned to face me and his expression was guarded and hard to read. I hadn't seen that look on his face before.

He said, "You speak to all my girls?"

"All but Sunny."

"Yeah. You didn't see her yet, huh?"

"No. I tried her a few times last night and again around noon today. I didn't get any answer."

"You didn't."

"No. I had a message from her last night, but when I called back she wasn't there."

"She called you last night."

"That's right."

"What time?"

I tried to remember. "I left the hotel around eight and got back a little after ten. The message was waiting for me. I don't know what time it came in. They're supposed to put the time on the message slip but they don't always bother. Anyway, I probably threw away the slip."

"No reason to hang onto it."

"No. What difference does it make when she called?"

He looked at me for a long moment. I saw the gold flecks in the deep brown eyes. He said, "Shit, I don't know what to do. I'm not used to that. Most of the time I at least think I know what to do."

I didn't say anything.

"You're my man, like you're working for me. But I don't know as I'm sure what that means."

"I don't know what you're getting at, Chance."

"Shit," he said. "Question is, how much can I trust you? What I keep coming back to is whether I can or not. I do trust you. I mean, I took you to my house, man. I never took anybody else to my house. Why'd I do that?"

"I don't know."

"I mean, was I showing off? Was I saying something along the lines of, Look at the class this here nigger has got? Or was I inviting you inside for a look at my soul? Either way, shit, I got to believe I trust you. But am I right to do it?"

"I can't decide that for you."

"No," he said, "you can't." He pinched his chin between thumb and forefinger. "I called her last night. Sunny. Couple of times, same as you, didn't get no answer. Well, okay, that's cool. No machine, but that's cool, too, 'cause sometimes she'll forget to put it on. Then I called again, one-thirty, two o'clock maybe, and again no answer, so what I did, I drove over there. Naturally I got a key. It's my apartment. Why shouldn't I have a key?"

By now I knew where this was going. But I let him tell it himself.

"Well, she was there," he said. "She's still there. See, what she is, she's dead."

Chapter 22

She was dead, all right. She lay on her back, nude, one arm flung back over her head and her face turned to that side, the other arm bent at the elbow with the hand resting on her rib cage just below her breast. She was on the floor a few feet from her unmade bed, her auburn hair spread out above and behind her head, and alongside her lipsticked mouth an ellipse of vomit floated on the ivory carpet like scum on a pond. Between her well-muscled white thighs, the carpet was dark with urine.

There were bruises on her face and forehead, another on her shoulder. I touched her wrist automatically, groping for a pulse, but her flesh was far too cold to have any life left in it.

Her eye was open, rolled up into her head. I wanted to coax the eyelid shut with a fingertip. I left it alone.

I said, "You move her?"

"No way. I didn't touch a thing."

"Don't lie to me. You tossed Kim's apartment after she was dead. You must have looked around."

"I opened a couple of drawers. I didn't take anything."

"What were you looking for?"

"I don't know, man. Just anything I ought to know about. I found some money, couple hundred dollars. I left it there. I found a bankbook. I left it, too."

"What did she have in the bank?"

"Under a thousand. No big deal. What I found, she had a ton of pills. That's how she did this here."

He pointed to a mirrored vanity across the room from the corpse. There, among innumerable jars and bottles of makeup and scent, were two empty plastic vials containing prescription labels. The patient's name on both was S. Hendryx, although the prescriptions had been written by different physicians and filled at different pharmacies, both nearby. One prescription had been for Valium, the other for Seconal.

"I always looked in her medicine chest," he was saying. "Just automatically, you know? And all she ever had was this antihistamine stuff for her hay fever. Then I open this drawer last night and it's a regular drugstore in there. All prescription stuff."

"What kind of stuff?"

"I didn't read every label. Didn't want to leave any prints where they shouldn't be. From what I saw, it's mostly downs. A lot of tranks. Valium, Librium, Elavil. Sleeping pills like the Seconal here. A couple things of ups, like whatchacallit, Ritalin. But mostly downs." He shook his head. "There's things I never heard of. You'd need a doctor to tell you what everything was."

"You didn't know she took pills?"

"Had no idea. Come here, look at this." He opened a dresser drawer carefully so as not to leave prints. "Look," he said, pointing. At one side of the drawer, beside a stack of folded sweaters, stood perhaps two dozen pill bottles.