“He seem to you like somebody who was enjoying the attention?”

“Looked like he wished the floor would swallow him. Can’t see him doing it, either, gentle guy like him.”

“You’re saying that ’cause he’s gay.”

“Well, yeah, I guess so.”

“That don’t make him gentle,” Hurley said. “He’s got that wiry kind of build, he could be a lot stronger than he looks. He could be a ballet dancer, and they’re real strong.”

“Ballet dancer. You’re just sayin’ that on account of he’s gay.”

“You think he killed them, Arthur?”

“No.”

“We’ll check his alibi, but what do you bet it holds up?”

“No bet. One in the Village was strangled, wasn’t she?”

“And these three were beaten and stabbed.”

“And besides,” Pender said, “they already got the writer for the one in the Village.”

“If he did it.”

“Yeah, the man could be innocent. You ask him, bet that’s what he says he is.”

“As a newborn baby. Arthur, you see any connection between the two cases besides the Warsaw Whiz? Where’d he say he was from, Ham Sandwich or something?”

“Hamtramck. Don’t ask me how to spell it.”

“Outside of Detroit, he said.”

“Inside of Detroit. It’s an autonomous area within the bounds of the City of Detroit.”

“How do you happen to know that?”

“No idea. One in the Village sold real estate?”

“Something like that.”

“Be an easy thing to say you did.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just looking for a connection besides Mop & Glo. Any chance she could have been a working girl?”

“Lived in the Village and tricked on Curry Hill? Be interesting to know.”

“And not too hard to find out,” Pender said, and reached for the phone.

“N O R E C O R D O F P R O S T I T U T I O N , no rumors she was ever in the game. Marilyn Fairchild didn’t just call herself a real estate agent, she made a good living at it. Commissions in 2001 exceeded $150,000, and ninety percent of that must have been in eight months, because how many co-ops changed hands after 9/11?”

“It was worth a call,” Hurley said.

“Plus she had a reputation for going out and dragging men home with her, which is the story on how she and Creighton wound up together.”

“That’s his name. It was driving me nuts I couldn’t think of it.”

“And working girls aren’t like musicians, they don’t finish up their paid gigs and then jam all night for free.”

“You know what we’re going to get, Arthur? It was some fucking john, he went with one girl and she didn’t want to do what he wanted her to do—”

“‘No, no, not in the ass, what kind of a girl do you think I am?’ ”

“Or he planned it from the jump, whatever it was, but either way he went batshit. He killed everybody and went home.”

“Must have planned it. Used a hammer and a chisel, according to the ME. You don’t find those layin’ around in your average whorehouse.”

“Unless it’s some kind of special whorehouse for carpenters. I’d say he brought his tools with him. Came late, too, after the other girls called it a night.”

“Right.”

“Probably fixed it so he was the last customer. Only had women to kill that way.”

“Another reason why it’s not the Polack. You kill what you want to fuck, basic principle of lust murder.”

“If that’s what this was.”

“What else could it be? Madam wasn’t paying the right people and this was to teach her a lesson?”

“Some lesson. How’s she gonna pay now?”

“Even if someone in one of the families is pissed at her, nobody’d do it like this. A hammer and chisel?” They batted it around, thinking out loud, trying out theories.

“I hate the coincidence part,” Hurley said. “Creighton goes home with Fairchild and strangles her. Our perp—”

“The Feebs’d call him the unsub.”

“Our perp goes to a quiet little whorehouse, picks up a hammer and chisel and thinks he’s a kid again in shop class. And both premises, Fairchild’s apartment and our whorehouse, have the same ballet dancer come by to do a little dusting and cleaning.” Pender said, “About Creighton.”

“What about him?”

“They have an argument, he’s half in the bag, next thing you know she’s dead.”

“So?”

“Lot more people get drunk than kill somebody.”

“Where you going with this, Arthur?”

“Meaning he’s most likely leaning that way from the start.”

“Leaning toward murder.”

“I been drunk a whole lot of times,” Pender said. “I never once wound up with my hands around nobody’s neck.”

“So he killed Fairchild, and then what? He finds out he likes it?”

“Happens like that, sometimes.”

“Yeah, but don’t forget he got arrested. You figure they let him out nights so he can go get laid?”

“He’s in a cell? Do we know that?”

M A U R Y W I N T E R S S A I D , “T A L K to him? Ask him questions? No way I’m gonna let that happen.”

“Sir, three women were killed last night, and—”

“I’m sorry to hear that. If it was up to me everybody would live forever, and that goes double for women. The Mets lost, did you happen to notice? Mo Vaughn struck out three times and hit into a double play. You want to ask my client anything about the game?”

“Was he there?”

“What, at the game? They’re on the road, they were in Houston.

He’s on bond, he had to surrender his passport, so how could he go to Texas?”

The lawyer had the cops grinning. Creighton, under strict instructions not to open his mouth, found the spectacle entertain-ing. At least until you considered the content, which was that they were trying to hang another killing, a triple murder, on him.

The white one, Dennis Hurley, big red-haired guy, map of Ireland on his face, said, “Mr. Winters, let me just tell you where we’re coming from. We got a case with a possible link to Mr.

Creighton here, and we’d like to rule him out.”

“Go right ahead. Rule him out. While you’re at it, tell your buddies to rule him out for Fairchild.”

“If he can account for his time last night—”

“Why the hell should he? He’s charged with one crime, he’s under no obligation to help you with another one.”

“That’s understood.”

“So?”

“If he was at the ball game,” Arthur Pender said, “not in Houston, but did the Yankees play at home last night?”

“Against the Brewers, and Soriano homered twice. You fellows should follow the game. It’s America’s pastime, in case nobody told you.”

“Nobody tells us anything,” Pender said. “If he was there, with Senator Clinton on one side and Cardinal Egan on the other—”

“Isn’t there a joke starts like this?”

“—then we could cross him off our list and be on our way.”

“This was last night? What hours are we looking at?”

“Ten to midnight.”

“Ten P.M. to midnight? The medical examiner working with a stopwatch these days?”

“There’s more than medical evidence,” Pender said. “That’s our window, those two hours, and if your client can establish where he was during that time period we’ll thank you for your time and leave you alone.”

“Which I think you’ll do regardless,” Winters said, “because I don’t know where he was last night. To find out I’d have to ask him, and do you know why I’m not going to do that?”

“I bet you’ll tell us,” Hurley said.

“Because if I ask him,” Winters said, “and he can’t prove where he was, and I tell you to go screw yourselves, I’d be telling you in the process that he can’t establish an alibi, and why should you have any such information? Whereas if I tell you right off the bat to go screw yourselves, that’s all I’ll be telling you, and you can do it or not as you see fit.”

“Do what or not?”

“Screw ourselves,” Pender said. He shrugged, got to his feet. “It was worth a try. If you do talk to him, and if he does have an alibi you want to tell me about—”

“I never liked sentences with ifs in them,” Winters said. “Tell me something. Why are you looking at him in the first place?”

“Can’t tell you that.”

“You don’t give nothing, my friend, you’re not gonna get nothing. You’re telling me this man’s a suspect but you can’t tell me why he’s a suspect?”

“He’s not a suspect.”

“He’s not a suspect but you want to know has he got an alibi.

Lovely. Why are you looking at him?”

The cops exchanged glances. At length Pender shrugged, and Hurley said, “The body was discovered by the same kid who discovered Fairchild.”

“What, the faygeleh? That’s your connection?”

“Same guy is first on the scene twice in a couple of weeks? What are the odds on that?”

“At the moment, my friend, they’re a hundred to one in favor of it, because it already happened. I’m not saying it’s a coincidence.

There’s a connection, but what it connects is Fairchild to the dead women, and can we stop pretending we don’t know who they are?

I listen to the news the same as everybody else. This was in the East Twenties, if I’m not mistaken, in what the girl announcer didn’t quite call a whorehouse, but I got the distinct impression.”

“East Twenty-eighth,” Hurley said. “And yeah, it was a whorehouse.”

“Three hookers?”

“Two and the madam.”

“Ah, Christ, what a world. They said bloodbath, but they generally do with a multiple homicide. They exaggerate.”

“Not this time.”

“Without asking what the murder weapon was, may I conclude the women weren’t strangled? Which I’d have concluded anyway, because for one man to strangle three women one after the other is a neat trick.”

“They weren’t strangled.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Winters said, “which sounds like a Dickensian law firm, doesn’t it? Never mind. I’ve enjoyed this, believe it or not, but I think we’re finished, so—” He said, “Maury?”

All three of them turned to look at him, as if surprised that he could talk, or that he was there at all.

“If I could talk to you privately,” he said.

“They were just leaving, which would have given us all the privacy anyone could want. But why don’t you fellows wait in the hall for a moment?”