“My husband wasn’t a hockey fan, but he liked young Warshawski. Anyway, he came home Tuesday night—yesterday morning that would be—and told me some uppity white girl was telling him to look after the boy’s apartment. That was you.” She nodded again. I didn’t say anything.

“Now Henry did not need anybody telling him how to do his job.” She gave an angry half sob and controlled herself again. “But you told him special not to let anyone into your cousin’s apartment. So you must have known something was going on. Is that right?”

I looked at her steadily and shook my head. “The day man, Hinckley, had let someone into the apartment without my knowing about it ahead of time. There were things there that some crazy fan would find valuable—his hockey stick, stuff like that—and legal documents I didn’t want anyone else going through.”

“You didn’t know someone was going to break in like that?”

“No, Mrs. Kelvin. If I’d had any suspicion of such a thing I would have taken greater precautions.”

She compressed her lips. “You say you had no suspicion. Yet you took it upon yourself to tell my husband how to do his job.”

“I didn’t know your husband, Mrs. Kelvin. I’d never met him. So I couldn’t see whether he was the kind of person who took his work seriously. I wasn’t trying to tell him how to do his job, just trying to safeguard the interests my cousin left to my charge.”

“Well, he told me, he said, ‘I don’t know who that girl’—that’s you—‘thinks is going to try to get into that place. But I got my eye on it.’ So he plays the hero, and he gets killed. But you say you weren’t expecting anything special.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Sorry doesn’t bring the dead back to life.”

After she left I sat for a long time without doing anything. I did feel in a way as though I had sent the old man to his death. He got my goat Tuesday, acting like I was a talking elevator door or something. But he’d taken what I said seriously—more seriously than I had. He must have kept a close watch on the twenty-second floor from his TV console and seen someone go into my cousin’s place. Then he’d gone up after him. The rest was unpleasantly clear.

It was true I’d had no reason to think anyone would be going into Boom Boom’s apartment, let alone be so desperate to find something he’d kill for it. Yet it had happened, and I felt responsible. It seemed to me I had a murdered man’s death to investigate.