“What kind of a warning?”

“A guy told me not to go looking for trouble.”

“You sure it was about Kim?”

“I’m sure.”

“You know the guy?”

“No.”

“What are you fixing to do?”

I laughed. “I’m going to go looking for trouble,” I said. “In Woodside.”

“Woodside?”

“That’s in Queens.”

“I know where Woodside is, man. What’s happening in Woodside?”

I decided I didn’t want to get into it. “Probably nothing,” I said, “and I wish I could save myself the trip, but I can’t. Kim had a boyfriend.”

“In Woodside?”

“No, Woodside’s something else. But it’s definite she had a boyfriend. He bought her a mink jacket.”

He sighed. “I told you about that. Dyed rabbit.”

“I know about the dyed rabbit. It’s in her closet.”

“So?”

“She also had a short jacket, ranch mink. She was wearing it the first time I met her. She was also wearing it when she went to the Galaxy Downtowner and got killed. It’s in a lockbox at One Police Plaza.”

“What’s it doin’ there?”

“It’s evidence.”

“Of what?”

“Nobody knows. I got to it and I traced it and I talked to the man who sold it to her. She’s the buyer of record, her name’s on the sales slip, but there was a man with her and he counted out the money and paid for it.”

“How much?”

“Twenty-five hundred.”

He thought it over. “Maybe she held out,” he said. “Be easy to do, couple hundred a week, you know they hold out from time to time. I wouldn’ta missed it.”

“The man paid out the money, Chance.”

“Maybe she gave it to him to pay with. Like a woman’ll slip a man money for a restaurant check, so it don’t look bad.”

“How come you don’t want it to be that she had a boyfriend?”

“Shit,” he said. “I don’t care about that. I want it to be whatever way it was. I just can’t believe it, that’s all.”

I let it go.

“Could be a trick instead of a boyfriend. Sometimes a john wants to pretend like he’s a special friend, he don’t have to pay, so he wants to give presents instead of cash. Maybe he was just a john and she was like hustling him for the fur.”

“Maybe.”

“You think he was a boyfriend?”

“That’s what I think, yes.”

“And he killed her?”

“I don’t know who killed her.”

“And whoever killed her wants you to drop the whole thing.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe the killing had nothing to do with the boyfriend. Maybe it was a psycho, the way the cops want to figure it, and maybe the boyfriend just doesn’t want to get roped into any investigation.”