“He still where he ought to be?”

“You mean hell?” Lucy cut in, seeming to know exactly what they were talking about. “That’s where he ought to be.”

“Don’t go getting any ideas, Rocky,” Marino said to her.

That used to be his nickname for Lucy, because she never knew when to quit swinging and was always challenging him to boxing and wrestling matches, until she turned twelve and got her period. His middle name was Rocco, so his calling her Rocky had always struck Scarpetta as a bit of projection going on. What he loved in Lucy was what he loved in himself and just didn’t know it.

“I don’t care what anybody says, I’m crazy about those damn movies,” Bacardi said as Louie was with them again already. “Even the last one, Rocky Balboa. I always cry at the end. I don’t know why. Real blood and guts? Not a tear. But the movies? I’m a mess.”

“Anybody driving?” Louie said again, and then answered himself, his usual routine, “Of course not. Nobody’s driving. I don’t know what happened. Gravity,” he added, letting them know their drinks were strong. “I start pouring, and gravity takes over. I can’t lift up the bottle, and I keep pouring.”

“My parents used to bring me here when I was a kid,” Berger said to Lucy. “This is old New York. You should absorb every detail, because one day there won’t be anything left of an era when everything was better, even if it didn’t seem so at the time. People would come in here and actually talk about art and ideas. Hunter Thompson. Joe DiMaggio.”

“I’ve never really thought of Joe DiMaggio talking about art and ideas. Mainly baseball—but not Marilyn Monroe. We all know he didn’t talk about her,” Lucy said.

“You better hope there’s no such things as ghosts,” Benton said to his almost niece. “After what you did.”

“I’ve been wanting to ask you about that,” Bacardi said to Lucy. “Wow. Now, this has got a hell of a lot of apples in it.”

She tucked her arm under Marino’s and leaned against him, and a butterfly tattoo lifted out of her tight knit top on a swell of bosom.

Bacardi said, “Since the damn thing crashed, and what a mystery that is, I never got to see the damn photograph. It’s fake, right?”

“What do you mean?” Lucy asked innocently.

“Don’t play your dumb-as- a-fox role with me.” Bacardi smiled and sipped her apple martini, not daintily.

Scarpetta said to Berger, “You must have seen some interesting people here when you were a kid.”

“Many of the people in the pictures on the walls,” Berger said. “Half of them Lucy has never heard of.”