“Didn’t Kim work the streets for a while? Didn’t she take a bust on that Long Island City stroll?”

“Years ago.”

“She had a pimp named Duffy, didn’t she? Did Cookie have a pimp?”

“Could be. Some of the TVs do. Most of ’em don’t, from what I know. Maybe I could ask around.”

“Maybe you could.”

“I haven’t seen Duffy in months. I think I heard he was dead. But I’ll ask around. Hard to figure, though, that a girl like Kim had anything in common with a little Jewish queen from the Island.”

A Jewish queen and a Dairy Queen, I thought, and thought of Donna.

“Maybe they were sisters,” I suggested.

“Sisters?”

“Under the skin.”

I wanted breakfast, but when I hit the street I bought a paper before I did anything else, and I could see right away that it wasn’t going to make a good accompaniment for my bacon and eggs. Hotel Ripper Claims Second Victim, the top teaser headline announced. And then, in big block caps, sex-change hooker butchered in queens.

I folded it, tucked it under my arm. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do first, read the paper or eat, but my feet decided for me and picked neither of those choices. I walked two blocks before I realized I was heading for the Y on West Sixty-third, and that I was going to get there just in time for the twelve-thirty meeting.

What the hell, I thought. Their coffee was as good as anybody else’s.

I got out of there an hour later and had breakfast in a Greek joint around the corner on Broadway. I read the paper while I ate. It didn’t seem to bother me now.

There wasn’t much in the story I didn’t already know. The victim was described as having lived in the East Village; I’d somehow assumed she lived across the river in Queens. Garfein had mentioned Floral Park, just across the line in Nassau County, and evidently that was where she’d grown up. Her parents, according to the Post, had both died several years earlier in an air crash. Mark/Sara/Cookie’s sole surviving relative was a brother, Adrian Blaustein, a wholesale jeweler residing in Forest Hills with offices on West Forty-seventh Street. He was out of the country and had not yet been notified of his brother’s death.

His brother’s death? Or his sister’s? How did a relative relate to someone who’d changed sex? How did a respectable businessman regard a brother-turned-sister who turned quick tricks in strangers’ parked cars? What would Cookie Blue’s death mean to Adrian Blaustein?

What did it mean to me?

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. Any man’s death, any woman’s death, any death in between. But did it diminish me? And was I truly involved?