Moore flipped the notebook shut and slipped it back inside his jacket. “At least that’s how she’s playing it.”

“Any reason to doubt her?” Keegan said. “Hell, they hand out Seconal in PEZ dispensers up here.”

Moore looked in the direction of Ormsby’s place, squinting in the sunlight, despite the Panama hat. “It’s early,” he said. “I don’t know what I believe.” Another jingle of coins in his pocket. “Something’s not right down there.” He looked at Keegan, serious now. “You’ve got that gun, right?”

“Gun?”

Moore squinted at him a few unsettling seconds. “The one you were shooting the other morning,” he said. “The one I got pulled out of a meeting for.”

“Oh, yeah,” Keegan said. “Sorry about that.” He felt the urge to talk—to just rattle out words—but he held himself together and tamped out the impulse like a spent cigarette. He’d seen a lot of police interrogations from the far side of a two-way mirror. He’d seen a lot of men talk their way into a prison cell. He measured his words before he spoke. “Some high-school kid with a badge was trying to play me, so I might have dropped your name,” he said. “I owe you one for that.” He hadn’t answered the question, he knew. And Moore was still waiting. “It’s just an old .38 revolver,” he said. “Ancient, really. I keep it in my office. Locked in a file cabinet.”

Moore nodded again. “Do me a favor,” he said. He took out the notebook. He put his fountain pen’s cap in his teeth so he could unscrew it. He scribbled something in the notebook and then screwed the top back on the pen. “Stay up here a few nights,” he said. “Keep the poor dog company.” He tore the page out of the notebook and handed it to Keegan. “And keep an eye on the girl for me.” He slipped the pen and notebook back in his jacket.

Keegan tried to hold the page steady with his bloodless fingers. It listed Moore’s phone numbers: precinct, office, home. “I usually get paid for this kind of thing,” Keegan said.

Moore grinned—a set of wide, too-white teeth. “The day Jimmy Keegan won’t watch a beautiful woman free of charge is the day we really are past it,” he said. “Keep an eye out. I’ll buy you a drink and we can compare notes.”

IT WAS NEARLY six in the evening when Keegan climbed the front steps of the brick entryway and pressed Ormsby’s doorbell. He heard the muffled two-toned chime on the other side of the thick oak door. He wondered if Eve would even hear the bell if she were deep in the house, or, more likely, locked away in that bedroom with her books and her sleeping pills. There was no rustle of life inside the house. He rang again. Again, the house was still.