He glanced at me with his dark-circled gray eyes. “Sandy made the news but you didn’t,” he said, sounding like an all-night D.J. who smoked too much. “Blood on your face.”

“Yeah.”

“Crusty shit on your jacket.”

“Not the first to notice.”

“Brush it off and take it to a dry-cleaner.”

Unintentional irony.

I went into the bathroom and got out of the suit coat and wadded it up and stuffed it in the wastebasket. Richard Bennett could make me a new one. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. My tie was loose but I didn’t remember making it that way. The blood spots on my cheeks were like freckles applied for a high school play. I ran cold water and splashed it on my face. Soaped up my hands and rubbed the stuff off. Brownish water swirled down the drain.

I went back out there in my short-sleeve white shirt and shoulder-holstered nine mil. I said to Carr, “Any special reason you’re here?”

He didn’t answer me. The TV was heading into the national anthem, signing off for the day, and he got up and shut it off, the cigarette dangling from that not-quite-a-smile. We stood facing each other in the open area between the foot of the bed and the door. He brought his ashtray along, nursing the cigarette’s gray residue.

“I liked her,” he said. “She was a tough broad but she wasn’t mean. That’s not a bad combination.”

“No it isn’t.”

He took some smoke in. Let it out. “And she really held onto her looks. Always a pleasure doing business with her. See who killed her?”

“Somebody in an Ace Cab.”

“Almost anybody could be driving an Ace Cab. They all have records, you know. You could hire any of those crumbs to do about anything. Still. Doesn’t mean Joe Costello was behind it.”

“Is that right.”

The zombie eyes slitted. “I heard stories about you, Heller.”

“Have you.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you went out and did something about this.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“From one old soldier to another, it’s not worth it. I liked Sandy fine. I am gonna miss her sweet ass and salty talk. But she knew what she was getting into. All these people do. It’s like my son.”

“You have a son?”

“I did have. He was wild. I tried to put him on the straight and narrow, but that’s hard when you don’t set a good example. He made it out of Korea alive. Came back and, here’s a funny coincidence, drove cab a while. Then he got involved with some East St. Louis lowlifes, and the next thing you know, Bobby…that was his name, Bobby…”

Another unintentional irony.

“…turns up dead in the trunk of his car. Stab wounds, gunshot wounds, tortured first. People said some assholes figured his old man hid the Greenlease money and maybe he knew where. He was twenty-four. People would come up to me all sorry and sympathetic, tell me how terrible it was. I told them, he was dead to me long before that. After that, I could’ve cut ties with every crooked son of a bitch on both sides of the river, but I didn’t. My boy made his bed. Like Sandy. Not telling you what to do or not to do, Mr. Heller. Just one old soldier to another.”