Then he said, “I remember the Clutters. I was an altar boy at a church not too far from Lansing prison, where Hickock and Smith sat on death row and were executed.”

Now my pulse jumped. “You’re kidding me. Why didn’t you ever tell me this before?”

“It wouldn’t have occurred to me that you’d be interested, we were both so young. I had the minimal interest for anything outside my world, like any other preteen boy. More interested in books and baseball…”

Carlo’s voice drifted off and I asked if he was thinking or falling asleep. Sometimes with him it was hard to distinguish the difference.

“Just remembering,” he said. “Later I read In Cold Blood, of course. But I don’t remember that Capote talked about the Walkers.”

“He did. Just briefly because he was convinced that Hickock and Smith didn’t kill the family even though they were practically in the same town when it happened. One month after they killed the Clutter family in Kansas, another family of four is killed in Florida. It’s always felt like too much of a coincidence, their being so close. But Perry Smith denied it, and Capote believed him.”

“The Walker case was never solved?”

“Never. Not in nearly sixty years. It’s become sort of a hobby for cold case investigators in Florida. Every once in a while a detective with time on his hands goes back to it. Sometimes I google Walker family murders myself.”

“When did you check into it last?”

I thought, finally committed to “Long time ago.”

“And?”

“Nothing new.”

Silence again marked only by the swish of the ceiling fan. Carlo always listened for a long time after I finished one of my stories. He finally said, “You say you’re no longer affected by that evening, but I would guess you are. I can hear it in your telling. I hear that child in you.”

I was plastered against Carlo’s side, our heartbeats long slowed, but his right arm around me drew me even closer. Then we talked. There’s no imagining what kinds of postcoital conversations people can have, and there’s nothing for honesty like talking while naked.

“My friend Weiss would agree with you, about those times affecting me.” Weiss was a psychological profiler for the FBI and my longtime associate. “He says I became an FBI agent because I was chasing my personal demons.”

“Did you ever catch them?”

I laughed and rubbed the side of my face against his bare shoulder. “No. They’re slippery sons of bitches.”