“There’s more to this than I can tell you now. And you know I can’t talk long. Please tell Eileen that I’m all right.”

“Of course.”

Devlin hung up. Now he was going to have to get some distance from the motel before he could stop to eat. Liz and that plainclothesman would be alive if Devlin had taken John’s advice when he had first offered it. Devlin drew his breath and tried to slow himself down. It was pointless to look for other people to blame for any of this. He wanted to be free, able to eat when he was hungry, not marched to a commissary with a thousand other men. In his position, other people would be doing the same thing, and there was no shame in being tough about it.

He missed what the map had showed to be the exit closest to DiBennedetti’s place, and then spent twenty minutes sorting through Paterson’s numbered streets and avenues—and getting lost and turned around until he was in front of a courthouse with so classical a set of columns and frieze on top that it looked like something out of a movie set. Definitely not DiBennedetti’s place. A cop who looked like a bouncer in a whorehouse stocked with ugly women gave him directions that led past a little waterfall, then some old red brick buildings that looked nineteenth century. The cop’s directions seemed right, the turns where they were supposed to be, the street numbers counting off as satisfyingly as an office clock marching toward quitting time. Out of the downtown area, Paterson looked settled and comfortable with itself, like a couple married long enough to have a second refrigerator in the garage. Ninety-five percent of the buildings were covered with aluminum siding. The siding made for so many horizontal lines that the whole place looked like it had been drawn on the looseleaf paper in a schoolboy’s notebook.

Devlin ran the same pattern past DiBennedetti’s street that he had tried yesterday afternoon in Brooklyn. Two-story houses lined both sides of a tree-shaded block where there was plenty of curbside parking, like Sunnyside forty years ago. On a workday most cars were elsewhere. Devlin made the turn for a drive-by. The numbers on the houses were easy to see. Devlin couldn’t go too slowly, or a second time around, lest some self-appointed street-watcher take him for a burglar.