“What happened to your door?” I said. The possibilities spiraled across my brain. It could have been stolen, or sold, or damaged in a storm and taken for repairs. It could have—no, Gilda. We don’t need another mystery.

“What happened to your dress?” said his partner, a leathery, hollow-cheeked sadist named Koszler. “You’re looking like a drowned rat.”

“Keep staring, and I’ll be the last rat you ever see. I need you to tuck your tail between your legs, scurry up those steps, and return with Lieutenant Thorne.”

“You don’t give me orders.”

“I have a murder to report. A rather remarkable murder.”

“Lieutenant Thorne is out, miss,” said Lavangetto. “His duties as a community liaison keep him away from the precinct most afternoons.”

“You mean he’s in one of Barbarossa’s flophouses, sleeping off last night’s drunk.”

“How ’bout cha leave a message?”

“Fine. A man named Galen Copeland was shot to death on the Westside docks.”

“Shot? With what? A bow and arrow?”

“With a gun.”

“You drunk, lady, or you got sunstroke?” asked Koszler, laughing in an altogether unattractive way.

“Sadly, neither.”

“So if we were to desert our post and saunter over to the docks with you, we’d find a man with a bullet in him?”

“I doubt you’ll find the bullet. The shot blew . . . there’s just no bullet to find.”

“But the body—it’ll show a gunshot wound?”

“They blew up the body.”

“Who did?”

“The men who robbed the yacht.”

“There’s a yacht now?”

“For god’s sake, if you will just follow me to the docks I can show you the wreckage.”

“The department didn’t put us on the Westside to chaperone crazy girls.”

“We guard the door,” said Lavangetto. “Or we did. Now we guard the, uh, the hole.”

“Then let me speak to someone else.”

“There ain’t nobody else left in the building.”

“But if you’d like to go inside,” said Koszler, “we’d be happy to give you a private tour.”

I could have punched him in the nose, stepped on his foot, or insulted his manhood, but none of it seemed worth the effort. This wasn’t my case anymore. I left them to their laughter and turned toward home. I saw no one on the streets, save for the girl at the rickety bridge over Morton Creek—the icy stream that runs where Morton Street used to be. Normally, it costs a penny to cross the bridge, but she saw that I had no purse and paid me no mind.