“Let’s just say I didn’t get no bill of sale. Fellow who sold it to me, he never said it was stolen. All he said was he’d take a hundred dollars for it. I should have picked that up when I got the photograph. See, I bought it ’cause I liked it, and then I gave it to her because I wasn’t about to wear it, see, and I thought it’d look good on her wrist. Which it did. You still think she had a boyfriend?”

“I think so.”

“You don’t sound so sure no more. Or maybe you just sound tired. You tired?”

“Yes.”

“Knockin’ on too many doors. Wha’d this boyfriend of hers do besides buy her all these presents that don’t exist?”

“He was going to take care of her.”

“Well, shit,” he said. “That’s what I did, man. What else did I do for that girl but take care of her?”

I stretched out on the bed and fell asleep with my clothes on. I’d knocked on too many doors and talked to too many people. I was supposed to see Sunny Hendryx, I’d called and told her I would be coming over, but I took a nap instead. I dreamed of blood and a woman screaming, and I woke up bathed in sweat and with a metallic taste in the back of my mouth.

I showered and changed my clothes. I checked Sunny’s number in my notebook, dialed it from the lobby. No answer.

I was relieved. I looked at my watch, headed over to St. Paul’s.

* * *

The speaker was a soft-spoken fellow with receding light brown hair and a boyish face. At first I thought he might be a clergyman.

He turned out to be a murderer. He was homosexual, and one night in a blackout he had stabbed his lover thirty or forty times with a kitchen knife. He had, he said quietly, faint memories of the incident, because he’d kept going in and out of blackout, coming to with the knife in his hand, being struck by the horror of it, and then slipping back into the darkness. He’d served seven years at Attica and had been sober three years now on the outside.

It was disturbing, listening to him. I couldn’t decide how I felt about him. I didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry that he was alive, that he was out of prison.

On the break I got to talking with Jim. Maybe I was reacting to the qualification, maybe I was carrying Kim’s death around with me, but I started talking about all the violence, all the crime, all the killings. “It gets to me,” I said. “I pick up the paper and I read some damn thing or other and it gets to me.”