I went home and went to bed. I got up in the morning with a sense of dread and wrote it off as the residue of an unremembered dream. I showered and shaved and it was still there. I got dressed, went downstairs, dropped a bag of dirty clothes at the laundry and left a suit and a pair of pants at the dry cleaners. I ate breakfast and read the Daily News. One of their columnists had interviewed the husband of the woman who’d caught the shotgun blast in Gravesend. They’d just moved into that house, it was their dream house, their chance for a decent life in a decent neighborhood. And then these two gangsters, running for their lives, had picked that particular house to run to. “It was as if the finger of God had pointed to Clair Ryzcek,” the columnist wrote.

In the “Metro Briefs” section, I learned that two Bowery derelicts had fought over a shirt one of them had found in a trash can in the Astor Place BMT subway station. One had stabbed the other dead with an eight-inch folding knife. The dead man was fifty-two, his killer thirty-three. I wondered if the item would have made the paper if it hadn’t taken place belowground. When they kill each other in Bowery flop-houses, it’s not news.

I kept thumbing through the paper as if I expected to find something, and the vague feeling of foreboding persisted. I felt faintly hungover and I had to remind myself I’d had nothing to drink the night before. This was my eighth sober day.

I went to the bank, put some of my five-hundred-dollar fee in my account, changed the rest into tens and twenties. I went to St. Paul’s to get rid of fifty bucks but there was a mass going on. I went to the Sixty-third Street Y instead and listened to the most boring qualification I’d heard yet. I think the speaker mentioned every drink he’d had from the age of eleven on. He droned on in a monotone for forty solid minutes.

I sat in the park afterward, bought a hot dog from a vendor, ate it. I got back to the hotel around three, took a nap, went out again around four-thirty. I picked up a Post and took it around the corner to Armstrong’s. I must have looked at the headline when I bought the paper but somehow it didn’t register. I sat down and ordered coffee and looked at the front page and there it was.

call girl slashed to ribbons, it said.