“Count your blessings. Twenty years ago I was the kind of guy who’d have reached for it.”

Now she had to speak over her own voice, as the announcement tape of her answering machine came on. The volume was up so they could hear who was calling. “And there was a time, to hear you tell it, when you could have talked on the telephone and done the other at the same time.”

She was teasing him. He hadn’t told her anything of the sort. But in fact he had done it, talked on the telephone while making love, a long time ago, before his separation from Maryellen Brennan. “Done the other” passed through his thoughts, too. Eileen had stopped using the universal four-letter term because her Irish accent made fook of it, which sounded so childlike to Devlin he couldn’t help laughing. After all this time together they still laughed at each other like innocents. They were a miracle, she’d said once, and he believed it. The caller began to leave his message.

“This is Captain Dan Cummings, of the One-twelve. I’m looking for Detective Frank Devlin. It’s kind of an emergency.”

“Go ahead,” Eileen said. He didn’t move. “You never know,” she said.

He reached to the night table and picked up the handset. “Hello.”

“Devlin? You’re Frank Devlin?”

The connection was lousy; the guy sounded like he was shouting in a tunnel. Devlin dialed down the volume on the answering machine, but that didn’t help. “Do I know you, Captain?”

“Ah, no. No, you don’t. Of course everybody knows your name. People here have a special memory of you, and I need a certain kind of help—”

Eileen tapped him on the shoulder. If he was going to talk on the telephone, she wanted to untangle. He sighed. “I’m the right Devlin.”

“I’m not your customer,” Cummings said quickly. He sounded like an older guy. “It’s, ah, my brother-in-law.” He let the words hang in the ether a moment, and it made Devlin think that Cummings was making an admission of defeat. “He’s I guess what you call a binge drinker. He’ll be on the wagon for six months, and then he’s gone for three, four days. He comes home filthy and sometimes with a little blood on him, too. Always broke. He just drinks until he’s broke.”

“And he’s a cop, eh?”

“Not one of us, no,” Cummings said. “He’s some kind of cop over in Jersey. He wants a cop, and my sister remembered something I said about you, something I heard on the job. Just a minute.” He was back before Devlin had reached his cigarettes. “Are you recording this?”

“Oh, yeah. The machine’s running.”

“Could you turn it off, please? And erase the tape?”