The small kitchen was partitioned off from the main room by a low counter. He made the coffee on the granite countertop using a French press. He pushed down on the plunger, poured the coffee into two gold-rimmed coffee cups and brought them, with cream, sugar, napkins and spoons, on a lacquered tray that he set down on the coffee table.

“So,” he said, “little Nick’s gonna get his payoff.”

“You have a problem with that?” I asked neutrally.

He spooned sugar into his coffee. “The kid was a gold-digger. We all knew, but Bill couldn’t see it, and when I tried to tell him we had a big fight and he stopped talking to me.”

I tried to square my impressions of Nick with Lauro’s accusation. “Why do you say Nick was a gold-digger?”

“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? He got Bill to move him into his flat and pay for everything and now he gets the insurance money. Listen, the kid was eighteen when Billy met him. Bill was handsome and successful. All Nick brought to the party was his twink ass.”

I sipped my coffee, stifling the distaste I was beginning to feel for Michael Lauro.

“Maybe Bill did all that because he loved Nick.”

“You know Bill’s story?”

“Somewhat,” I replied. “Why don’t you tell me.”

Lauro got up and crossed the room to a curtained alcove. He pulled open the curtains to reveal a bed, got on his knees, lifted the bed ruffle and rummaged around, emerging with a photo album bound in red leather. He came back to the sofa and opened the album on his lap. He flipped though pages of fading photographs, then stopped and pointed to a snapshot of a very tall, skinny young man with a comic face, a big grin, and a shock of orange hair. He had his arm around a shorter, unsmiling, dark-haired boy I recognized as a young Bill Ryan.

“Waldo,” he said. “And Billy.”

“How old was Bill when this was taken?”

“They’re standing in front of the old Hide ’n Seek, so he must have just got to San Francisco. Eighteen or nineteen, maybe.”

“Bill looks scared.”

“When Billy was eighteen, his dad found him with another boy’s cock in his mouth and beat him so bad they had to take out his spleen. After he got out of the hospital, they gave him a one-way ticket to San Francisco and told him, don’t come back. He got here with nothing but the clothes on his back. If he hadn’t met Waldo, he would have had to peddle his ass on Polk Street to survive. So, yeah, he was scared.”

“Waldo Kornowsky. You knew him?”

“Everyone knew Waldo. He was Polk Street’s official welcome wagon. He knew all about boys like Billy.”

“What do you mean?”