“Can you describe your wife, please?” asked Detective Lynch.

“Plain, five foot five, unattractive, whiny voice, brown stringy hair, brown eyes, shows a lot of upper gum when she laughs. Even when she smiles. Skinny, no figure to speak of. Flat as a breadboard. No ass. Not the pick of the litter. But sweet. And humps like a mink. Since I treated her, that is. I worry about that.”

“About what?” asked Detective Murphy.

“About her humping. Since I straightened her out she can’t get enough. I mean, you’ve never seen such a turnaround. I’m worried that maybe she’ll get horny and want to hump one of the kidnappers. Or all of them if there’s more than one.”

“Yeah,” said Detective Lynch, “it could be a—”

“So how do we catch these guys?” asked Arthur Durch. “How do I get my sweet wife back? I love her so much. You know how much? More than there are stars in the sky. You know who said that? ‘I love my wife more than there are stars in the sky’?”

“No,” said Detective Murphy.

“Neither do I. Somebody did ’cause I’ve heard it before. I miss my wife terribly. She listens to all my new poems and tells me what she thinks of them. I wrote a new poem last night she hasn’t even heard. Wanna hear it? It goes like this:

Hamlet Hamlet,

You make a great omelet.

“What do you think? No comment, huh? My wife would have had a comment. See why I miss her? Listen, you guys, if I had twenty million dollars or forty million dollars, it wouldn’t matter. I’d give it all to the kidnapper to get my wife back, I really would. I’d go back and live in Bensonhurst if I could just get her back. And you know what I’ll do if I don’t get her back?”

“What?” said the detectives.

“I’ll kill myself, that’s what I’ll do. I swear I will. You don’t believe me, do you? You don’t think I love Evie enough to really kill myself, do you? Well, I do. And I will. I’ll kill myself. I’ll take a shitload of drugs and kill myself.”

“Easy, Mr. Durch. Easy,” said Detective Murphy.

“Life won’t be worth living for me,” said Durch, crying now. “I swear it won’t. So tell me, fellas, what should I do?”

“You could always try out for The Big Question,” said Detective Lynch.

Durch stopped crying. “What’s The Big Question?”

The day after the championship fight, Sonny Lieberman telephoned his staff to be at his office at exactly five o’clock. When Sonny’s employees arrived, many of them were in bad moods. Most of them had been working very hard the last few weeks of the promotion and were looking forward to having Sunday off. Once everyone was there, a white-faced Sonny asked the gathering whether anyone had seen a box of ringside tickets.

No one answered.