A big man in his prime. A black man—so the music at least was good—though it may be incorrect to say, to even notice—African Americans have much better music for death than white people do. He’d been a cop. Starting in the sixties. Then bookended by scandals. The one in the seventies opened the gold shield door for him. The second, in the nineties, prompted his exit.

They were the crazy years.

I know the man been to the wall, I know the wall was rough. I don’t know how many men he killed. I know he killed enough. Their ghosts seemed to form themselves from the thick, heavy, urban air, into sad, dim things, coming toward the casket, maybe drawn by the burnished bronze, silver handles, plush champagne satin liner, glittering like a fishing lure. Maybe to waft his ghost away. Maybe to be sure he was really dead. Once they’d bushwhacked a route from the impalpable to the corporeal, other haunts sensed the opportunity, or just got pulled along by the draft. I surmised that the ones that followed immediately behind, based on whom they gazed at and whom they attempted to address, belonged to Owen Cohen, who had been Winston’s partner in the NYPD.

I’d done business with both of them. While they were still on the job, they’d moonlighted for me. When I wanted to get out of the PI racket, they turned up to buy me out and paid in cash. Whatever that suggests is far more likely to be true than not.

I meanwhile had an ordinary, pleasant, live person’s conversation with Owen. He said business was good, but not as good as it had been, big companies largely created through national security money were moving in and everything was going digital. By then, some of my own ghosts were sneaking in, some to taunt, some to make me mourn…my wife and my son…to tear my heart out if I’d still had one.

Back home, the scrambling of my two cats intent on a kill woke me from my memories and dreams. Carl Sandberg had conned us all…“the fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over the harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on”…into thinking that cats move with no more sound than drifting mist…but given the right surface they thump and thud, they skid, and even knock things over. I have two. Scotty’s the cute, sociable one. Huba’s the killer. His little face actually looks somewhat like Elisha Cook, Jr.’s, the little gangster in The Maltese Falcon, but when he kills, he’s as straightforward and ruthless as Richard Widmark pushing the old lady in the wheelchair down the stairs in Kiss of Death. Scotty’s starting to learn from Huba. I praised them both for the mouse they’d caught sneaking into the kitchen. It’s their job.