He looked out at the gridlocked traffic on the other side of the expressway. “I thought she was a gift from heaven. A flawless, kind, caring beauty who would become everything her father wasn’t. But as time wore on, I saw that she was acting. That’s what she is, a better actor than her father. But no different. So, being an old man, and having lost my innocence a long time ago, I realigned my perspective on the situation and took what I could from it. She uses me, and I use her, and both of us pray for the demise of Trevor Stone.” He smiled at me. “She may be no better than her father, but she’s prettier and much more fun in bed.”

Nelson Ferrare looked at me through bleary eyes and scratched himself through his Fruit Of The Looms. Behind him, I could smell the stale sweat and spoiled-food aroma permeating his apartment like a fever.

“You want me to sit on this guy?”

Daniel Griffin looked terrified, but I don’t think it was Nelson he feared yet, though he should have. It was Nelson’s apartment.

“Yeah. Till midnight. Three hundred bucks.”

He held out his hand and I put the bills in them.

He stepped back from the doorway and said, “Come on in, old man.”

I pushed Daniel Griffin over the threshold and he stumbled into the living room.

“Handcuff him to something if you have to, Nelson. But don’t hurt him. Even a little bit.”

He yawned. “For three bills, I’ll make him breakfast. Too bad I can’t cook.”

“This is outrageous!” Griffin said.

“At midnight, kick him loose,” I said to Nelson. “I’ll see you.”

Nelson turned and shut the door.

As I walked down the hallway of his building, I heard his voice through the thin walls: “One simple rule of the house, old guy: You touch the remote control, I cut your hand off with an old saw.”

I took the subway back downtown and picked up my personal car from the garage on Cambridge Street where I keep it stored. It’s a 1963 Porsche I restored much in the same way Jay restored his Falcon—piece by piece over many years before it was even roadworthy. And after a time, it was the work, and not the result, that I felt a fondness for. As my father once said when he pointed out a building he’d helped construct before he’d become a fireman, “The building don’t mean shit to me, but that brick there, Patrick? And that whole row on the third floor there? I put them there. The first fingers to ever touch them were mine. And they’ll outlive me.”

And they did. Work and its results always outlived those who labored at it as any Egyptian slave-ghost will tell you.