In the movie Edward G. Robinson plays an insurance investigator. He refers repeatedly to the “little man in the center of my chest,” who always knows more than he himself about any investigation he’s conducting.

Manning’s inner world, if my own little man is any judge, is about nothing but pain. He’s buried in it. It lives in his cells twenty-four hours a day. I don’t know the source and I don’t want to know.

But I do worry.

The day ends. Manning exits without a word to anyone. I stay at my desk, finishing notes and reports for the day.

Manning is walking home from the office now. I know his route exactly because I’ve had to track him down half a dozen times on orders from Gleason or Silver, when Manning has walked out early or just bolted at day’s end when there were still division meetings on the calendar.

DivSix’s headquarters are at West Sixty-Eighth and Amsterdam Avenue, in the new city-owned complex two long blocks from the Hudson. Leaving there, Manning walks up to Seventy-Second and hikes east in all weathers. He never takes a bus or a cab, never calls for an Uber or a self-driver, and won’t ride the subway even in a blizzard. He stops for an Old-Fashioned at Crosby’s on Seventy-Second and Columbus Avenue, early, six or six-thirty, when the sun is still high in the summer.

Crosby’s is a down-at-the-heels Irish haunt with linoleum floors and backless stools with chrome legs and red vinyl seats and little hand-lettered signs above the bar listing the prices of the ridiculously dated drinks they serve there. Manhattans, Rob Roys, Rusty Nails. Who ever heard of these concoctions? Crosby’s is the most depressing joint I’ve ever been in. It’s not even dark like a bar. It reeks of urine and old men. But Manning hits it every night.

His drinking is another character anomaly. Ask him any other time of day and he’ll order a club soda like he’s in AA (which he’s not). But after work he downs an Old-Fashioned like clockwork and many nights more than one. I don’t even know what an Old-Fashioned is.