His sharing his story made Michelle surprisingly glad. “Hey, if you’re not doing anything this evening, why don’t you come to dinner at my house? You can meet my daughter, and then you would know at least two people in New York.”

His eyes lit up. “I’d like that,” he said. “What time?”

“How about seven? It should give you enough time to finish up your Committee business. Let me give you my information, then we can walk back to the office together.”

He pulled out his phone. “Ready when you are.”

Uncle Chowder’s Clam Bar was a long-standing Jokertown favorite. The neon sign high on its front brick facade picturing a top-hatted clam had been tap dancing on rickety stick legs for decades. It currently enjoyed a reputation vastly more refined than in its initial years when it shared the building with a bottom-floor dive called Squisher’s Basement. Squisher himself was long-gone and his basement now contained The Foxes Booze and Cruise, an upscale gay bar—though among jokers the distinction between sexes was sometimes blurred. It catered to a younger and, for Jokertown, a moderately sophisticated and upscale clientele, joker yuppies who were gentrifying nearby neighborhoods. At times both the gentrification and the gays were not, the Angel knew, totally welcomed by the locals, but in Jokertown money talked and the less fortunate, no matter how long they’d been living in the neighborhood, walked.

Chowder’s was intimately lit, with a polished wooden buffet bar, a scattering of cloth-covered tables, and a row of plushly cushioned booths against the wall opposite the bar. The sound system was playing something from Lady Gaga, one of the current diva crop, a mystery chantreuse who refused to confirm or deny if she was a joker. The Angel only recognized the song because it was ubiquitous. She knew as much about Lady Gaga as she did about other current pop culture phenoms, or maybe even less. She and Billy didn’t get out much.

She scanned the room. It was moderately busy with a late dinner crowd, mostly couples, quietly absorbed in their lobster bisques, raw oysters, and King Crab legs.

He’d be in a booth, she thought, and she was right.

The handsome young cop who was Franny Black’s partner was huddled alone in a corner of a booth near the end of the row. He looked up when the Angel slid next to him into the booth. Despite the dim lighting, she could see worry, apprehension, even perhaps a bit of fear on his face.

“Officer Stevens,” she said in a low voice barely audible over the music.

“Agent, uh—”

“As I said, call me Angel, or Bathsheeba, as you will.”

“Yes, of course.” He took a sip from the glass he held cradled in both hands, a thick, squat block of cut glass with a few ice cubes covered by a couple of fingers of dark amber liquid. “Can I get you a drink, Angel?”