It was crazy, like his friend Pinchik said everything was. “People’re hot to kill,” Pinchik once told him. “Don’t believe me, Roger, go see Psycho; watch the audience watching that scene in the shower where he stabs her in the tits, the belly, the juice, and there’s blood everywhere, and that knife’s going into her with a crunch.

“The people don’t look away. They watch with their mouths open, like they were watching a good fuck. . . . People’re hot to kill,” he’d concluded.

Was that it? Hawkins wondered miserably. Were they hot to do it?

“Maybe he didn’t have enough on him,” Ableson said. “Maybe they hated philosophy teachers. Why. Did you ever hear a reason that made sense?”

It was only midnight; the air conditioning was off for the night and the men sweated. Most of the windows had been sealed shut and last week Max Aronson had thrown his chair at one of them but succeeded only in cracking it. The cracked window made the room look raffish.

Hawkins took off his tie and jacket.

“Can I see them?”

“You better do it tonight. They’ll be out by tomorrow night because no one saw nothin’, no one heard nothin’, no one says nothin’. I had half the street in here. It looked like the Puerto Rican Day picnic in here.” Ableson twisted paper clips. “I ‘interviewed’ thirty-­five of them. They were home when it happened. They live on the ground floor. It’s hot, so they had their windows open—”

Hawkins cut in, “Let me see the kids.”

“Okay. See ’em. Try and kill a couple while you’re down there.”

They were in the holding room on the third floor. Ableson called it the pen. They were sitting at tables, or on the molded plastic benches against the wall. They were active . . . smoking, eating candy, twisting the handles on the vending machines.

Hawkins stopped in the doorway, confused because he couldn’t remember what he’d expected to see when he opened the door. They were just a bunch of kids, sixteen, seventeen, and too lively to sit still. Hawkins crossed the room and pulled one of the kids’ hands away from the knobs of a vending machine and smashed his back against the machine. The change inside jingled.

“No candy,” Hawkins said.

The boy backed away from him to the others. They looked at each other, then at Hawkins, who was still in his tux with the strings of his tie hanging loose around his neck. He looked exhausted, his skin had a gray cast, and his eyes were bloodshot. He outweighed the biggest of them by fifty pounds and they looked scared.

“Adam Levy was my friend,” he said.

“Who?” asked one. He was very thin and he had black-lashed blue eyes.