Even the Wicked

Still, I couldn't attribute my presence in front of Armstrong's to a talkative disease or a restless monster.

As far as I knew, I'd never had a drink of anything stronger than cranberry juice on the northwest corner of Fifty-seventh and Tenth. I had stopped drinking by the time Jimmy moved from his original Ninth Avenue location. There had been other gin mills at Tenth and Fifty-seventh before his, including one I could remember called The Falling Rock. (It got the name when a neighborhood guy bought it and started remodeling the facade. While he was working on a ladder, a chunk of stone flaked off and fell, conking him on the head and almost knocking him cold. He figured it would be good luck to name the joint after the incident, but the luck didn't hold; a little while later he did something that irritated a couple of the Westies, and they hit him harder and more permanently than the rock had. The next owner changed the name to something else.)

I didn't want a drink, and I wasn't hungry, either. I shrugged it off and turned around, looking across the intersection at what I suppose I'll always think of as Lisa Holtzmann's building. Was that what I wanted?

An hour or so with the Widow Holtzmann, sweeter than whiskey and easier on the liver, and almost as certain a source of temporary oblivion?

No longer an option. Lisa, when I last spoke to her, had told me that she was seeing someone, that it looked serious, that she thought the relationship might have a future. I'd been surprised to discover that the news came as less of a blow than a relief. We agreed that we'd stay away from each other and give her new romance a chance to flower.

For all I knew it had gone to seed by now. The new man was by no means the first she'd dated since her husband's death. She'd grown up with a father who came to her bed at night, thrilling and disturbing her at once, always stopping short of intercourse because "it wouldn't be right,"

and she would be awhile working her way out of the residue of those years. I didn't need a shrink to tell me that I was a component of that process. It was not always clear, though, whether I was part of the problem or part of the solution.

In any case, Lisa's relationships did not tend to last, and there was no reason to believe the latest was still viable. I could without difficulty imagine her sitting by the phone now, wishing it would ring, hoping it would be me on the other end of it. I could make the call and find out if what I imagined was true. It was easy enough to check. I had a quarter handy, and I didn't need to look up the number.

I didn't make the call. Elaine has made it clear that she does not expect me to be strictly faithful. Her own professional experience has led her to believe that men are not monogamous by nature, and that extracurricular activity need not be either a cause or a symptom of marital disharmony.

For now, though, I chose not to exercise that freedom. Now and then I felt the urge, even as once in a while I felt the desire for a drink.

There is, I have been taught, all the difference in the world between the desire and the act. The one is written on water, the other carved in stone.

* * *

Glenn Holtzmann.

Unaccountably pleased with myself for having resisted the slenderest of temptations, I marched east on Fifty-seventh and got almost to the corner of Ninth Avenue before the penny dropped. I had been dreaming a dream which I was somehow certain had some bearing on Adrian Whitfield's murder, and Elaine had somehow managed to coax and tease the subject of that dream out of some dark corner of my mind. It was Glenn Holtzmann I'd dreamed about, and I'd stood staring at the building he'd lived in

without making the connection.

Glenn Holtzmann. Why was he disturbing my sleep, and what could he possibly be trying to tell me? I'd hardly had time to consider the point when Will's latest letter drove the question clear out of my mind.

I stopped at the Morning Star and sat at a window table with a cup of coffee. I took a sip and remembered one of the few meetings I'd had with Holtzmann. I'd been sitting in that very window, and perhaps at that very table, when he'd tapped on the glass to get my attention, then came inside and shared my table for a few minutes.

He'd wanted to be friends. Elaine and I had spent one evening with him and Lisa, and I hadn't liked him much. There was something off-putting about him, though I'd have had trouble defining it. I couldn't recall everything he'd said that time at the Morning Star, although it seemed to me that was when he'd informed me that Lisa had had a miscarriage. I'd felt sympathy for him then, but it hadn't made me want his friendship.