From the window over the sink; I watched the white Ford LTD park in front. The driver’s door opened, and Marino climbed out. He hitched up his trousers and adjusted his tie, his eyes taking in everything around him. As I watched him follow the sidewalk to my porch, I was so powerfully touched that it startled me.

“I’m not sure if I should be glad to see you or not,” I said when I opened the door.

“Hey, don’t worry. I’m not here to arrest you, Doc.’

“Please come in.”

“Hi, Pete,” Lucy said cheerfully.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in school or something?”

“No.?”

“What? Down there in South America they give you January off?”

“That’s right. Because of the bad weather,” my niece said. “When it drops below seventy degrees, everything shuts down.”

Marino smiled. He looked about the worst I had ever seen him.

Moments later I had built a fire in the living room, and Lucy had left to run errands.

“How have you been?” I asked.

“Are you going to make me smoke outside?”

I slid an ashtray closer to him.

“Marino, you have suitcases under your eyes, your face is flushed, and it’s not warm enough in here for you to be perspiring.”

“I can tell you’ve missed me.”

He pulled a dingy handkerchief from his back pocket and mopped his brow. Then he lit a cigarette and stated into the fire. “Patterson’s being an asshole, Doc. He wants to scorch you.”

“Let him try.”

“He will, and you’d better be ready.”

“He has no case against me, Marino.”

“He has a fingerprint found on an envelope inside Susan’s house.”

“I can explain that:” “But you can’t prove it, and then there’s his little trump card. And I swear I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I’m going to.

“What trump card?”

“You remember Tom Lucero?”

“1 know who he is,” I said. “I don’t know him.”

“Well, he can be a charmer and he’s a pretty damn good cop, to be honest. Turns out he’s been snooping around Signet Bank and talked up one of the tellers until she slipped him information about you. Now, he wasn’t supposed to ask and she wasn’t supposed to tell. But she told him she remembered you writing a big deck for cash sometime before Thanksgiving. According to her, it was for ten grand.”

I stared stonily at him.

“I mean, you can’t really blame Lucero. He’s just doing his job. But Patterson knows what to look for as he ages through your financial. He’s going to hammer you hard when you get before the special grand jury.”

I did not say a word.

“Doc.” He leaned forward and met my eyes. “Don’t you think you ought to tally about it?”

“No.”