“I don’t think that’s it,” he said. “I just don’t know how you show up at a sheriff’s office and say ‘Hey, did you boys kill a nigger as a favor to the President?’”

“You tell anyone about the call?”

“No, no one.”

You can do the math. That means you’re the first. This is much more intimate than sex.

“I’m honored,” she said.

She smiled to show she was not kidding.

“And you still don’t know what to do about it?” she asked. “If anything?”

He nodded.

She gently shook her head: “That’s a tough one. Are you going to let it drop?”

“So far I have.”

“I don’t know what I’d do.”

They were silent for a moment. This is a woman who stood up to the CIA—and from the inside, he thought. She’d really let the episode fade? Let official history go undisturbed?

“Thanks for not judging,” he said.

Lancette touched her bottom lip with her index finger. She leaned back into the couch and gazed out the window at a crowd of club-hoppers. Two men were loudly singing an old disco song. A black van drove past the house. Addis thought he had seen it a few minutes earlier. A poor soul circling for parking? Or …

“I’ll get around to it,” she said. “Some judgments take longer than others.”

He wondered if they ever would kiss. The singing outside turned into a howl.

“You know,” she said, “I was reading an interview with this Dutch architect. He was saying, ‘the street is dead,’ but—”

“Not here,” Addis interrupted.

“That’s what I was thinking.”

The phone rang. Addis picked up the cordless phone on the desk. The battery was dead.

“I’ll let it ring,” he said.

The answering machine picked up.

“Nick, it’s M. T., are you there? Are you screening? Jesus Christ, pick up the phone. It’s important.”

He ran into the kitchen.

“Fuckit, Nick, pick up,” O’Connor said.

He grabbed the phone and said hello.

“Damnit, Nick,” Lancette heard O’Connor complaining. “I got to—”

The phone machine shut off.

Lancette stood and looked at the message machine. The number 15 was illuminated. From one of the piles, she picked up a baseball. She could not read the autograph. Stop snooping, she told herself. She thought about the phone call from Flip Whalen.

Addis came out of the kitchen. He had gone pale. She dropped the ball. It landed on the rug and rolled several feet.

“They shot Clarence,” he said.

She froze in place.

“Who?”

“No one knows.”

“Where?”

“Near Bennington Gardens. A housing project in the Southeast. They call it, ‘Simple City.’”

“Shit. And?”

“They don’t know. He’s at G.W. Unconscious, but still alive.”

Addis pushed aside the papers on his desk and found the remote for the television. He clicked it on.

“Another Washington tragedy,” a news anchor was saying.