He turned his back to me and I came in behind him and shut the door. His apartment complex was a pale, pink brick building on Montvale Avenue, Stoneham’s main strip. The building was squat and ugly, two stories high, and probably housed about sixteen units. Donald’s studio apartment, I assumed, was representative. A living room with a foldout couch that spilled dirty sheets from under the cushions. A kitchen too small to cook an egg in. From the bathroom off to the left, I could hear the steady drip of water. A scraggly roach ran along a baseboard by the couch, probably not looking for food so much as lost and disoriented from the mushroom cloud of pot smoke that hung over the living room.

Donald tossed some newspapers off the couch so Angie could take a seat under a six-foot-tall, four-foot-wide poster of Keith Richards. It was a photo I’d seen before, taken back in the early seventies. Keith looked to be very stoned—surprise—and leaned against a wall with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in one hand, the omnipresent cigarette in the other, wearing a T-shirt that bore the words JAGGER SUCKS.

Angie sat down and Donald looked up at me as I threw the bolt lock on his door and removed my gun from its holster.

“Hey!” he said.

“Donald,” Angie said, “we don’t have a lot of time here, so we’ll be brief.”

“What’s this got to do with AAF, dude?” He looked at my gun and even though I hadn’t raised it from its place down by my knee, he recoiled as if he’d been slapped.

“The AAF story was bullshit,” Angie said. “Sit down, Donald. Now.”

He sat. He was a pale kid, emaciated, with bushy yellow hair cut short and sticking straight up off his apple-shaped head. He looked at the bong on the coffee table in front of him and said, “You guys narcs?”

“Stupid people annoy me,” I said to Angie.

“Donald, we’re not narcs. We’re people with guns and not a lot of time. So, what happened the night Anthony Lisardo died?”

He clapped his hands over his face so hard I was sure it would leave welts. “Oh, man! This is about Tony? Oh man, oh man!”

“This is about Tony,” I said.

“Oh, dude!”

“Tell us about Tony,” I said. “Right now.”

“But then you’ll kill me.”

“No we won’t.” Angie patted his leg. “I promise.”

“Who put the coke in his cigarettes?” I said.

“I don’t know. I. Do. Not. Know.”

“You’re lying.”

“I am not.”

I cocked the pistol.

“Okay, I am,” he said. “I am. Put that thing away. Please?”

“Say her name,” I said.