I said I thought these people would say that it was only money, that they weren’t really hurting anyone, they weren’t really evil like killers or rapists or child molesters. I said probably every one of them could point to a time when they themselves had been victims, when some kind of damage had been done to them—especially when they were too young to defend themselves. And who had cared then? Who had been there to look out for them? I said they could probably all name a dozen ways in which they’d been cheated out of something they thought they should have. It was a dog-eat-dog world. It was a jungle out there. It was every man for himself. Deal with it.

Is what I said I thought such people told themselves.

The man gave me a sideways glance. That’s deep, he said with just a hint of mockery. You a psychologist?

I told him I was a writer.

Interesting, he murmured, his gaze absently tracing the path of his cigarette smoke.

I thought of the Hitchcock movie about a man known as the Merry Widow Murderer. Uncle Charlie, fulminating against rich old widows—“fat, wheezing animals,” who, according to him, had no right to all their money. “What happens to animals when they get too fat and too old?” To him, his victims deserved to be slaughtered.

Since his mother had stopped going out, the man had arranged for regular deliveries of groceries and other necessities to her door and for someone from a housekeeping service to come in and clean once a week. Certain things, however, had not been cleaned in a long time. Windows, for example. This I would discover when I began visiting the woman, which would never have happened had I not got into a conversation with her son in the courtyard that day.

After Hurricane Sandy, when our building lost power for several days, he’d been beside himself thinking about her all alone in the cold and dark. At least landlines had been working. But, he said, in the next emergency—and there would always be a next—who knew what might happen. For years he’d been trying to get her to move upstate, but she wouldn’t budge.

Mom was always a bit on the stubborn side, he said. But now, forget about it. Be like moving the Rock of Gibraltar.