“As the gentlemen of the press will happily note,” he might say, standing astride a bloodied corpse, “the victim was dispatched with a vigorous uplifting motion of a bluntly sharpened something or other. A preliminary phrenological diagnosis confirms that the culprit is possessed of a distinctly ovoid, even egg-shaped, skull.”

And the next morning, to the delight of the boys in the pressroom, a thug would be presented whose hands were bloody and whose skull was undeniably egg-shaped. Never mind that the blood was his own, that his skull had been battered into shape by eight hours under the truncheon. Quick results and a good quote beat accuracy any day.

Avenge enough murdered aldermen, and a policeman’s star will rise. He was taken off the beat and put into plainclothes, where he became the pride of the department. The ferocious rage that had made him such an adept street fighter stepped into the background, to emerge only occasionally—when faced with a reluctant interrogation suspect, or in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner. For a decade or two, he was the most renowned detective in New York. In one banner year he caught the mayor’s killer, the thief who stole the doors off the Metropolitan Museum, and the labor agitators who blew up the east wing of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Somewhere in there he married and produced a daughter.

A year or two after the turn of the century, Virgil began to slip. It was agony to watch, and now the Copeland women were going through the exact same thing.

I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and thinking about mustard—thick and brown and spicy enough to scour the day’s foul taste from my tongue. I slipped downstairs, navigating by touch, and stepped around the piles of junk that decorated my kitchen floor. There was a bit of bread left. I spread it thick with mayonnaise and mustard, and shoved as much as I could into my mouth. It tasted like a corpse. I spat the mouthful across the floor and slapped on the lights. The sauces, opened fresh that morning, had gone rancid—green and black and spotted with mold. I scraped my tongue against my mouth, spitting uncontrollably until the taste began to ebb.

I threw out both jars of sauce. If Hellida found them, she would count their sudden death as yet another omen. She would probably be right.

As I walked up the stairs, my foot snagged on a second-floor nail that had worked its way up out of the wood. I limped up to my room and came back with my heaviest boot. Five minutes of banging would not force the nail back down. I tossed the boot aside and took my bloody foot to bed.