“You can’t do none better, not on Westside or East. Now you eat. I got something in the bedroom you’ll be dying to see.”

A few sips of soup, and the last remnants of my hour in the coffin washed off me. It was hot and strong. Van Alen drained his bowl before his mother returned. He dragged his sleeve across his mouth and swallowed a belch.

“Clubber Carr was a hard-nosed son of a bitch,” said Mrs. Van Alen. She set a long, flat scrapbook on the table and opened to the first page—a photograph of my father having a medal pinned on his chest by Commissioner Roosevelt. “Even as a boy, I knew he was tough as steel. He made a good cop. Most Westside boys grew up without much respect for law and order.”

She shot a look at her son. He blushed, and I slipped back into the past. The Sentinel morgue had nothing on Mrs. Van Alen. Every great case, every front-page spread was carefully pressed, preserved, and treasured. A diamond robbery on First Avenue. A bludgeoning in an Eastside high-rise. A fraud at the Chrystie Street bank. A woman killed on East Broadway when her father, irritated that she had violated curfew, set his dogs on her. Every case solved by the great Clubber Carr, who always came through in record time and with as many clever quotes as the reporters asked for. How strange to see my father working on the Eastside. How strange to see my father doing well.

There wasn’t a page in that book that didn’t make me want to cry.

I turned to a full-page spread from 1912, and Mrs. Van Alen tried to take the book away.

“Don’t read that page,” she said. “I hate that page.”

Naturally, I read on.

It was an account of my father’s last press conference, the final embarrassment in his career with the NYPD. Asked about the recent spate of disappearances in the Westside, Virgil launched into a tirade against the mayor, the chief of police, and anyone else whose name he could recall. He was clearly drunk, wrote the unnamed reporter, his uniform stained and his badge missing. My father’s ravings were incoherent, and according to the newspaper, not worth recording. Instead, they gave the article over to a long quote attacking the deranged detective, a quote from a respected voice inside the department who declared that the time had come to put Virgil Carr out to pasture.

The source’s name was Lieutenant Edward Thorne.

“He stuck that knife in hard, did Thorne,” said Van Alen.

“I never thought he had the spine.”

“Even a spineless man can only take so much. Eventually, he’ll lash out, try to prove to himself that he’s tough.”

“And then what?”