Our conversation had traffic noises for competition, and so we kept it brief and light. I didn’t get around to telling her about Sunny’s suicide. I didn’t mention the bottle of Wild Turkey, either.

I read the Post while I ate dinner. Sunny’s suicide had had a couple of paragraphs in the News that morning, which is as much as it merited, but the Post would hype anything that might sell papers, and their hook was that Sunny had the same pimp as Kim, who’d been chopped to pieces in a hotel just two weeks ago. Nobody had been able to turn up a picture of Sunny so they ran the shot of Kim again.

The story, though, couldn’t fulfill the promise of the headlines. All they had was a suicide and some airy speculation that Sunny had killed herself because of what she knew about Kim’s murder.

I couldn’t find anything about the boy whose legs I’d broken. But there was the usual complement of crime and deaths scattered throughout the paper. I thought about what Jim Faber had said about giving up newspapers. It didn’t seem like I’d be giving up all that much.

After dinner I picked up my mail at the desk. The mail was the usual junk, along with a phone message to call Chance. I called his service and he rang back to ask how things were going. I said that they weren’t, really. He asked if I was going to keep at it.

“For a while,” I said. “Just to see if it goes anywhere.”

The cops, he said, had not been hassling him. He’d spent his day arranging funeral services for Sunny. Unlike Kim, whose body had been shipped back to Wisconsin, Sunny didn’t have parents or kin to claim her. There was a question about when Sunny’s body would be released from the morgue, so he’d made arrangements to have a memorial service at Walter B. Cooke’s on West Seventy-second Street. That would take place Thursday, he told me, at two in the afternoon.

“I should have done the same for Kim,” he said, “but I never thought of it. It’s mostly for the girls. They’re in a state, you know.”

“I can imagine.”

“They’re all thinking the same thing. That business about death comes in threes. They’re all worrying about who’s next.”

I went to my meeting that night. It struck me during the qualification that a week ago I’d been in a blackout, wandering around doing God knows what.

“My name’s Matt,” I said when my turn came. “I’ll just listen tonight. Thanks.”

When the meeting broke up a guy followed me up the stairs to street level, then fell into step with me. He was about thirty, wearing a plaid lumber jacket and a peaked cap. I couldn’t recall seeing him before.