BECAUSE THE NIGHT

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albums by the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Jefferson Airplane, all bearing the block printed warning: “Beware! Property of Tom Goff! Hands off! Beware!” Lloyd held two albums up and examined the printing. It was righthand formed and identical to the printing on the living room walls. Smiling at the confirmation, he read through the remaining records, knowing that the common denominator of Goff’s musical taste was the 1960s, going cold when he saw a garish album entitled Doctor John the Night Tripper—Bayou Dreams.

Lloyd studied the jacket. A frizzy-haired white man wearing red satin bell bottoms was honking a saxophone at a snarling alligator. The song titles listed on the back were the typical sixties dope, sex, and rebellion pap, almost nostalgic in their naïveté. Putting the album down, he wondered if it were a Herzog-Goff link beyond general aesthetic strangeness—a link that could be plumbed for evidence.

There was a rapping on the wall behind him. Lloyd stood up and turned around, seeing Henderson and a small man in a terrycloth bathrobe. The man was casting unbelieving eyes over the black walls, mashing shaky hands together inside the pockets of his robe. “This guy’s the manager, Sarge. Said he saw our buddy this afternoon.”

Lloyd smiled at the man. “My name’s Hopkins. What’s yours?”

“Fred Pellegrino. Who’s going to pay for my busted door and this crazy paint job?”

“Your insurance company,” Lloyd said. “When did you see Thomas Goff last?”

Fred Pellegrino pulled rosary beads from his pocket and fondled them.

“Around five o’clock. He was carrying a suitcase. He smiled at me and hotfooted it out to the street. ‘See you soon,’ he said.”

“You didn’t ask him where he was going?”

“Fuck no. He’s paid up three months in advance.”

“Was he alone?”

“Yeah.”

“How long has he lived here?”

“About a year and a half or so.”

“Good tenant?”

“The best. No noise, no complaints, always paid his rent on time.”

“Did he pay by check?”

“No, always cash.”

“Job?”

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“He said he was self-employed.”

“What about his friends?”

“What friends? I never seen him with nobody. What if my insurance company don’t pay for this batshit paint job?”

Lloyd ignored Pellegrino and motioned Henderson over to the far side of the room. “What did the other tenants have to say?” he asked.

“The same spiel as Pops,” Henderson said. “Nice, quiet, solitary fellow who never said much besides ‘good morning’ or ‘good night.’ ”

“And no one else has seen him today?”

“No one else has seen the scumbag in the past week. This is depressing. I wanted to eighty-six the cop-killer motherfucker. Didn’t you?”

Lloyd gave a noncommittal shrug and took Goff’s R&I printout from his pocket. He handed it to Henderson and said, “Go back to Rampart and give this to Praeger. A.P.B., All Police Network. Tell him to add ‘armed and extremely dangerous’ and ‘has left-handed male partner,’ and to call the New York State Police and have them wire me all their existing info on Goff. Tell Pellegrino that I’m spending the night here as a safety precaution and shoo him back to his pad.”

“You’re gonna crash here?” Henderson was slack-jawed with disbelief. Lloyd stared at him. “That’s right, so move it.”

Henderson walked away shaking his head, taking a pliant Fred Pellegrino by the arm and leading him out of the apartment. When they were gone, Lloyd walked to the landing and looked down on the knot of people milling in the driveway. Bullet-proof vested cops with shotguns were assuring pajama-clad civilians that everything was going to be all right. After a few minutes the scene dispersed, the citizens walking back to their dwellings, the cops to their unmarked Matadors. When Henderson pointed a finger at his head and twirled it, then pointed upstairs, Lloyd dragged the sofa over to the devastated front door and barricaded himself in to think. Two divergent cases had merged into one and had now yielded one known perpetrator and one accomplice, an unknown quantity whose only known crime thus far was defacing rented property. With an A.P.B. in effect and I.A.D. covering the personnel file angle, his job was to deduce Thomas Goff’s behavior and go where less intelligent cops wouldn’t think to look. Lloyd let his eyes circuit the living room, knowing that it would merge with another horror chamber the very second he closed them, knowing that it was essential to juxtapose the imagery and see what emerged. He did it, shuddering against the memory of Teddy Verplanck’s bay-