He didn't seem to have heard me. He spoke in a dreamy tone. "A few times I thought of going over and talking to her. She would not laugh at me, like other women did. She was kind and understanding. Maybe, just maybe, she would see something in me others never did. I never built up enough courage to do it."

"And you killed her because you knew she wouldn't want you." But even to my ears the accusation sounded hollow, lacking in conviction.

His voice was plaintive, almost childish. "I didn't do it."

I scrutinized him for a long moment. He was certainly a credible suspect. He was mentally unstable, and he'd had a bizarre fixation on Esther. He might have been driven to rage and murder over her rejection of him, real or anticipated. Moreover, from his living room window, he had a clear view of Esther's building. He could see when all the neighbors had turned off their lights, when the time was right for him to cross the street, climb the stairs, and enter apartment six, where Esther and Willie slept.

He might have killed Willie for the reason Rivlin had suggested, because the baby had awoken and begun crying. But why would he disfigure their faces? Perhaps, again as Rivlin had said, it was simply an act of madness by a person who was clearly insane.

And afterward, with his clothes drenched in Esther's and Willie's blood, he could have crossed the street and entered his apartment without anyone seeing him. Easy.

But could this man, who had lunged at me so ineptly with a candlestick, break into an apartment and slash the throat of a woman before she could mount a struggle? And what of the fact that the killer had not struck before or since that night in August 1939—at least not in a sufficiently similar manner as to arouse Rivlin's suspicion? Manny Orrin, as his photo albums attested, had been obsessed with many women. If he had killed one, would he have been able to resist killing another for ten long years?

There was also the fact that I believed him. It was a belief not based on evidence but on instinct. Another investigator would have hauled him from his chair, slammed him against a wall, and third-degreed him for as long as it took to squeeze a confession out of him. It wouldn't have taken long. A little pressure would have broken him. That would have been enough for a police detective with few scruples. He would have downplayed or ignored the discrepancies between Orrin's confession and the crime scene. Just enough to get a conviction. Cops sometimes do that, especially when they're desperate or when their gut tells them they've got the right man, or when they find someone who deserves to be punished for something, even if he did not commit the specific crime they're investigating.