“People are happy to help,” I said. “If you ask nice enough. It’s their neighborhood. They want to help keep it safe.”

“And you’re keeping it safe?”

“I’m just trying to figure out what happened to my friend.”

“I thought you had it figured out.”

“The what. Not the who.”

“And how are you going to figure that out?”

“That’s out of my league,” I said. “I was hoping you could help with that.” I tried to give them a good face, the kind of face Frank could give someone and put them at ease. I don’t think it worked.

“I keep looking at you,” the cop said, “and I know I’ve seen you before. I should know who you are, at least.”

—

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know where we stood. They still hadn’t quite gotten to it, and I was wondering if they would.

“What were you doing down there with Frank?”

“Nothing special. We just hung out for a couple of days.”

“Where did you stay?”

“A hotel downtown; I can’t remember the name. Frank took care of it.”

“He booked it and paid for it?”

“I think so,” I said. “It might have been a gift from someone. Every once in a while someone would do that for Frank.”

“A gift?”

“Yeah, sometimes someone from the center or somewhere would give Frank something to thank him for helping them out.”

“You think that’s what this was?”

“I can’t remember. I can try to find out.”

“Maybe the name of the hotel. Let’s start there.”

“Sure,” I said. Maybe they already knew the name of the hotel. I don’t know how, we hadn’t used our real names. Maybe they didn’t know.

“Were you and Frank together all the time on your trip?”

“Yes,” I said. “Actually, no.”

“No. You weren’t together.”

“He went off on his own for a while,” I said.

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why’s that?”

“We had a fight,” I told them. “He stormed off for a while, and when he came back I didn’t ask him where he’d been.”

“Did this happen a lot? Him leaving you like that?”

“Never.”

“What was the fight about?”

“I don’t remember. Nothing important. Not important enough to remember anyway.”

“He never did this before, you said, but when he did, you don’t remember why?”

“Frank had his superstitions,” I said, telling a truth that was a lie. “We had a fight about a horse in the street. He thought it was a sign to get out of there. We didn’t know about the horse, that it wasn’t dead, you know. We’d paid for the room so I wanted to stay, but he wanted to leave. So he left.”

“So you had a fight and he left. What did you do during the time he was gone?”