But if I wanted that Jeffrey kid dead, I would have done it myself.”

“That’s not you, Ray.”

“I mean, do you have any idea how many times I sat on that porch with a piece of steel in my hand? I always drank my way out of it.”

“Is there anything you want to ask me about Jeffrey Bannion?” Billy offered.

Rivera ignored the question. “Last year we went to the national Memory Keepers convention, Johnny here came with us,” nodding to Pavlicek. “They had a bunch of workshops and seminars, and I sat in on a support group for fathers with murdered kids.” Rivera took another moist drag on his cigarette. “And this guy, some old biker from Texas, he said he sat in on the execution of his son’s murderer in Huntsville. Said it didn’t make a difference. Called it a letdown. But I’m not so sure that would’ve been the case with me.”

“Ray,” Pavlicek said gently, “we have to go.”

“Our pastor says Jesus wants us to try and forgive, but I’ll tell you, these last few years? I’m all about the God of the Jews.”

*   *   *

THEY CAME UPON JIMMY WHELAN in the lobby of the apartment house where he lived and worked as the super, a run-down prewar with a deep H-block courtyard on Fort Washington Avenue. At this hour the food odors of three continents crept down the elevator shaft like fog.

Whelan looked good for forty-six, a lean, sometime weight lifter with a full head of brown hair, a big nose, and the exaggerated mustache of a gunslinger. Which wasn’t too far off: by the time he’d retired he held the record for justifiable shots-fired incidents of any active police officer in the NYPD. Toward the end of his career, he was transferred to the Crime Scene Unit, one of the least likely places where a detective could find a reason to pull his weapon, but even with that squad he managed to get into a shootout, having wandered into a three a.m. bodega robbery while on a coffee run two blocks away from an indoor doubleheader being processed by his CSU team in the New Lots section of Brooklyn.

Dressed tonight in a dagger-collared cherry leather car coat and flare-bottom jeans, he was standing in front of the geriatric twin elevators, barking at a toffee-colored tenant with vaguely Asiatic eyes and a whippet mustache, the guy shoulder-toting a duffel bag as if on shore leave.

“What are you doing?” Whelan snapped.

“Spreading the joy!” His whiskey-hoarse voice just shy of a shout.

“The joy? Are you crazy? Get your ass back upstairs.”

“How you doing, sirs!” the guy said, turning to Billy and Pavlicek and extending his free hand. “Esteban Appleyard.”

Whelan abruptly walked away, shaking his head as if he had just about had it with this idiot.

“What you got in there?” Billy asked.

Appleyard opened his duffel to display mini-bottles of Rihanna Rebelle perfume, half-pints of Alizé VS cognac, and cellophane-wrapped packs of White Owl cigarillos.

“Have a cigar.” Appleyard beamed.

“I don’t smoke,” Billy lied.

“I’ll be in the car,” Pavlicek muttered, wheeling so abruptly that he nearly collided with Whelan, who was steaming back for more Appleyard.

“Where’s the money?”

“They gonna wire it to my bank.”

“When.”

“I don’t know.”

Whelan turned to Billy. “This guy just won ten million playing the lottery, can you believe that?”

“For real?”

Billy knew Whelan’s irritation had nothing to do with envy. Taking his super’s job to heart despite his run-and-gun résumé, Jimmy always projected this scolding vibe toward the more obliviously self-destructive members of what he considered his flock.

One of the elevators groaned open and a woman sporting an African head wrap stepped out, her arms filled with folded laundry.

Appleyard dug in his duffel and pulled out a bottle of perfume. “For you, Chiqui.”

“I don’t wear that,” she said sharply, as angry at him as Whelan.

“Give me a kiss.”

“You should move out of here,” rearing back from his ninety-proof breath. “Everybody knows.”

Looking to the lobby, now stripped of nearly all of its original 1920s furniture and mirrors, Billy was surprised to see Pavlicek still in the house, slumped over on the lone couch, his head sunk into his hands as if he were too exhausted to make it back out to the street.

“You got a car?” Whelan asked Appleyard.

“Buyin’ one. I like that Maybach, like Diddy got. A nice chocolate brown.”

“Can you even drive?”

“Drove a truck out of the poultry terminal for fourteen years before I got shot that one time,” yanking down his sweater collar to show the skid-mark scar on his collarbone.

Whelan pulled out a set of keys, stuffed them in Appleyard’s pocket. “You know my car?”

“The Elantra?” Appleyard sniffed. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that.”

“You go upstairs and pack. You take my car and go up to my cabin in Monticello for a week. Figure out where you want to live, what you’re gonna do with yourself, because around here, they’re gonna eat you alive.”

The woman nodded in agreement.

“Naw, man.” Appleyard waved him off. “People know me.”

“Exactly. Somebody comes to my door three days from now, says there’s a smell from 5D? I don’t want to find you, see some three-legged alligator tortured you for your ATM code, left you with a screwdriver in your ear.”

“Yeah, well.” Appleyard’s duffel slipped from his grip, the perfume and cognac bottles clinking on the smooth stone floor. “I can’t see that.”

The African tenant finally took off, crossing the lobby on her way to the front door, Pavlicek not even raising his eyes to her as she glided past the couch, her voluminous housecoat brushing his knees.

“And stop handing that shit out or you won’t even make it to two days. What’s wrong with you?”

“How much you want for the cabin and the car,” Appleyard asked, peeking into the duffel for spillage. “Because I know you want something.”

“For a week?” Whelan said, squinting at the ceiling. “Fifteen hundred.”

“And I’m supposed to worry about everybody else takin’ me off, huh?”

“Make it two thousand and I’ll come with you.”

“Charge me for you to come to your own house? You got a TV up there?”

“Of course.”

“They sell groceries up there?”

“No, everyone crawls around eating grass.”

“Bars?”

“You stay out of bars.”

“Naw, I’m gonna stay right here,” handing Whelan back his keys. “This is my block.”

“I tell you what,” Whelan said. “I’ll sell you the car for twelve grand.”

“I don’t think so.” Appleyard laughed, then hauled the duffel back up on his shoulder and took off down the hall to knock on doors.

As they finally headed out to the street, Pavlicek falling in with them silently, Billy’s cell rang, Stacey Taylor again, Billy killing this call from her too.

*   *   *

COLLIN’S STEAK HOUSE WAS SITUATED IN the financial district on a small cobblestoned lane lined with landmark nineteenth-century merchants’ homes and low shebeens named after Irish poets, the whole plunked down like an antique snow globe dwarfed and surrounded by a futuristic ring of office towers.