I was questioned at length at the crime scene, first by the uniforms who responded to the 911 call, then by somebody in plainclothes. It’s impossible to remember the questions and answers because I was only dimly aware of the procedure while it was going on. A portion of my mind was struggling to pay attention, taking in what was being said by others within earshot, monitoring the questions I was asked and the answers I gave. The rest of me was somewhere else, wandering aimlessly through corridors of the past, sending out forays into an alternate future. An if-only future, a future in which, because I’d done something differently, Jim was still alive.

When I was eleven or twelve I got hit in the forehead with a baseball and walked around all day with a concussion. This was like that. As if I’d been swathed in cotton wool, enveloped in fog. I wasn’t really taking anything in, and it would all imprint on my memory like dream time, soft and hazy and out of focus, with pieces missing.

It was a quarter to ten when the fog cleared, or lifted, or whatever it does. I noted the time on the wall clock in the squad room upstairs at Midtown North, where I dimly recall being taken in the back of a blue and white police cruiser. We could have walked; the station house was on Fifty-fourth west of Eighth, literally a stone’s throw from the Lucky Panda.

I suppose the whole precinct house knew the restaurant. Cops have a legendary appetite for doughnuts, but they also put away a lot of Chinese food, and some of Midtown North’s Finest were likely to be at least occasional patrons of the Lucky Panda. That gave me one more entry in the If-Only sweepstakes. Why couldn’t there have been a couple of uniforms at a front table? The shooter would have taken one look and gone home.

A quarter to ten. I hadn’t even noticed the time until now. I’d met Jim around six-thirty. We talked for a minute or two. I went to the lavatory, I used the lavatory, I came rushing out of the lavatory . . .

Three hours gone since then, and gone in no time at all. I must have spent a lot of it sitting or standing around, waiting for something to happen, waiting for somebody to tell me what to do. I must have been in a very tractable state. Unaware as I was of the passage of time, I hadn’t grown bored or impatient.

“Matt? Here, whyntcha have a seat? We’ll go over this one more time and then you can go home and get some rest.”

“Sure,” I said.

This detective’s name was George Wister. He was lean and angular, with a sharp nose and chin and a carefully trimmed little mustache. His beard was dark and heavy, and I suppose he’d shaved when he got up that morning but he needed to shave again and knew it. He had a habit of touching his cheek or chin, running a finger against the grain of his whiskers, as if to check just how urgent was his need for a shave.

He was around forty, 5’10”, dark brown hair, deep-set dark brown eyes. I registered all this and wondered why. Nobody would be asking me to describe the investigating officer. What they’d have liked from me was a description of the killer, and I couldn’t help them with that.

“I’m sorry to have kept you so long,” Wister was saying. “But you know how these things work. You were on the job yourself.”

“Years ago.”

“And it seems to me I’ve seen you around the house. You’re tight with Joe Durkin, aren’t you?”

“We’ve known each other awhile.”

“And now you’re working private.” I dug out my wallet and started to show him my license. “No, that’s all right,” he said. “You showed me before.”

“It’s hard to keep it straight. What I showed and who I showed it to.”

“Yeah, and everybody wants to go over the same ground, and the whole experience takes it out of you to begin with. You must be dead on your feet.”

Was I? I didn’t even know.

“And anxious to get home.” He touched his chin, his cheek. “Deceased is James Martin Faber,” he read off a clipboard, and went on to read Jim’s address and the name and address of his place of business, looking at me each time for confirmation.

I said, “His wife is—”

“Mrs. Beverly Faber, same address. She’s being notified, in fact they’ve probably been over to see her by now. Get her to make a formal ID.”

“I’ll have to see her myself.”

“You want to get some rest first, Matt. You’re in shock yourself right now.”

I could have told him it was wearing off. I was myself again, whatever that amounted to. But all I did was nod.

“Faber was a friend of yours.”

“My sponsor.” The word puzzled him, and I was sorry I’d used it because now I had to explain it. Not that there was any reason not to explain. There’s a tradition against breaking the anonymity of another AA member, but it’s a courtesy extended only to the living. “My AA sponsor,” I said.

“That’d be Alcoholics Anonymous?”

“That’s right.”

“I thought anybody could join. I didn’t know you had to be sponsored.”

“You don’t,” I said. “A sponsor’s something you get after you’ve joined, more a combination friend and adviser. Sort of like a rabbi on the job.”

“A more experienced guy? Pulls strings for you, helps you keep your nose clean?”

“It’s a little different,” I said, “in that there are no promotions in AA, and the only way you can get in trouble is by picking up a drink. A sponsor is someone you can talk to, someone who’ll help you stay sober.”

“Not a problem I’ve got,” he said, “but a lot of cops do, and no wonder. The stress you got to deal with day in and day out.”

Every job’s stressful when you need a drink.

“So the two of you met for dinner. You have something special on your mind, something you needed to talk about?”

“No.”

“You’re married, he’s married, but the two of you left your wives home on a Sunday night and went out for Chinese.”

“Every Sunday night,” I said.

“That so?”

“With rare exceptions, yes.”

“So it was a regular thing. Is that standard procedure in AA?”

“Nothing’s standard in AA,” I said, “except not drinking, and even that’s not as standard as you might think. Our Sunday dinners started as part of the sponsorial relationship, a way to get to know each other. Over the years it became just a part of our friendship.”

“’Over the years.’ He was your sponsor for a long time?”

“Sixteen years.”

“You’re kidding. Sixteen years? And you haven’t had a drink in all that time?”

“Not so far.”

“And you still go to the meetings?”

“I do.”

“What about him?”

“He did.”

“Meaning he stopped?”

I was trying to figure out how I was supposed to answer that when he got the point and his face flushed. “Sorry,” he said. “Been a long day.” He looked down at the clipboard. “Every Sunday night. Always the same restaurant?”

“Always Chinese,” I said. “Different restaurants.”

“Why Chinese? Any particular reason?”

“Just a habit we got into.”

“Well, you could pick a new Chinese restaurant every week and it’d be awhile before you ran out. What I’m getting at, who knew the two of you were going to be there tonight?”

“Nobody.”

“I take it you didn’t make a reservation.”

“At the Lucky Panda?”

“Yeah, I wonder did anybody ever make a reservation there. At lunch, maybe, because they’ll fill up noontime during the week, but on nights and weekends you can shoot deer in there.”

“Or people,” I said.

He looked at me, unsure how to respond. He drew a breath and asked me who picked the restaurant.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Let me think. He’d suggested a place on Fifty-eighth, but they’d gone out of business. Then I suggested Chinatown and he said that was too much trouble, and I think he was the one who thought of the Lucky Panda.”

“And when was this?”

“Yesterday, it must have been. We talked on the phone.”

“And picked the time and the place to meet.” He wrote something down. “And the last time you actually saw him was . . .”

“Friday night at the meeting.”

“That’d be an AA meeting, right? And you spoke on the phone yesterday and met for dinner tonight as arranged.”

“That’s right.”

“Did you mention to anybody where you’d be having dinner?”

“I may have said something to my wife. I don’t even know.”

“But nobody else.”

“No.”

“And he’d have told his wife?”

“Possibly. He’d probably have told her he was having dinner with me, but I don’t know that he’d have bothered telling her where.”

“You know his wife?”

“To say hello to. I doubt I’ve seen her twenty times in sixteen years.”

“You didn’t get along?”

“He and I were friends, that’s all. Elaine and I had dinner with Jim and Beverly a couple of times, but that’s literally all it was. Two or three times.”

“Elaine being your wife.”

“Right.”

“How were they getting along?”

“Jim and his wife?”

“Uh-huh. He ever talk about that?”

“Not lately.”

“So as far as you know . . .”

“As far as I know, they were getting along fine.”

“He’d have said if they weren’t?”

“I think so.”

“Who can you think of that he wasn’t getting along with?”

“Jim got along with everybody,” I said. “He was a very easygoing guy.”

“Didn’t have an enemy in the world.”

He sounded skeptical, the way cops do. “If he did,” I said, “I didn’t know about it.”

“How about his business?”

“His business?”

“Uh-huh. He was a printer, right? Had a printshop here in the neighborhood?”

I got out one of my business cards. “He printed these for me,” I said.

He ran his thumb across the raised lettering. Maybe he wanted to see if it needed a shave. “Nice work,” he said. “Okay if I keep this?”

“Sure.”

“Know anything about his business?”

“It didn’t come up in conversation a lot. A couple of years ago he was talking about packing it in.”

“Getting out of the business?”

“He was tired of it and I guess business was slow enough to be discouraging. For a while he was looking into buying a coffee bar franchise. This was back when there was a new one opening every time you turned around.”

“My brother-in-law bought one,” Wister said. “It’s been a pretty good thing for him, but they’re working every minute, him and my sister both.”

“Anyway, he decided against it and stayed with the printshop. Sometimes he talked about retiring, but I never got the impression he was ready to do it.”

“It says here he was sixty-three.”

“That sounds about right.”

“He in a position to retire?”

“I have no idea.”

“He didn’t talk about investments or debts, anything like that?”

“No.”

He probed his chin stubble. “Anything about a criminal element?”

“A criminal element?”

“Trying to muscle in on his business, say.”

“If anyone tried,” I said, “he’d have handed them the keys and wished them the best of luck. He squeezed a living out of the business, but it’s not something you get rich at, not something a gangster would want to take over.”

“He do any work for them?”

“For gangsters?”

“For organized crime.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“It’s not as farfetched as it sounds, Matt. Criminal enterprises need the same kinds of goods and services as everybody else. They need letterhead and invoice forms and order blanks and, yes, business cards, and God knows what else. They own a lot of restaurants, so they’re always getting menus printed. No reason your friend couldn’t have done some of their printing. He wouldn’t necessarily have known who he was doing it for.”

“I suppose it’s possible, but—”

“It’s also possible they’d have asked him to print up something that wasn’t kosher. To duplicate government forms or somebody else’s purchase order blanks, something dubious like that. Maybe he went along, maybe he refused to go along, maybe he learned something along the way he was better off not knowing.”

“What’s your point?”

“What’s my point? My point is your friend Faber was the victim of what looks like a very professional hit. Those guys don’t shoot you just to keep in practice, if he was mobbed up in any kind of way, innocent or otherwise, you’re doing him no favor by keeping it a secret.”

“Believe me, I’m not keeping any secrets.”

“Can you think of anybody who’d want to see him dead?”

“No.”

“Anyone associated with him who might have paid to have him killed? Or anyone in the criminal world who might have had any kind of a grudge against him?”

“Same answer.”

“You arrived at the restaurant, you sat down at the table. What was his state of mind?”

“Same as always. Calm, serene.”

“Nothing bothering him, far as you could tell?”

“Nothing that showed.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Anything and everything. Oh, you mean tonight?”

“You were with him a minute or two before you went to the john. What did the two of you talk about?”

I had to think. Ike and Mike, and then what?

“Air conditioning,” I said.

“Air conditioning?”

“Air conditioning. They had theirs turned up so it was like an icebox in there, and we talked about that.”

“Small talk, in other words.”

“Too small to remember.”

He took another tack, asked me if I’d got even the slightest glimpse of the shooter. I said what I’d been saying all along, that he was out the door and gone before I got back from the men’s room.

“Now memory’s a funny thing,” he said. “Different things affect it. Your mind doesn’t want to let a piece of information in, it walls off a section of memory and won’t give you access to it.”

“I could give you examples,” I said, “but that’s not what happened here. I was in the john when I heard the gunshots. I came running, I saw what had happened, and I chased out into the street hoping to get a look at him.”

“And you never saw him.”

“Never.”

“So you don’t know if he was tall or short, fat or thin, black or white . . .”

“I understand the witnesses said he was black.”

“But you didn’t see him yourself.”

“No.”

“Or any black man in the restaurant.”

“I didn’t pay much attention to the other customers, before or after the shooting. But the place was close to empty, and no, I don’t believe any of the other people in it were black.”

“How about seeing a car pulling away, which you didn’t happen to take note of at the time?”

“I’d have taken notice, because that’s what I was looking for, either a man on foot or a car puffing away.”

“But you didn’t see either one.”

“No.”

“Or a cab or . . .”

“No.”

“And now you can’t come up with anyone with a reason to want James Faber dead.”

I shook my head. “Not to say no such person exists,” I said, “but I can’t think of him, and I’ve got no reason to believe in his existence.”

“Except for what happened tonight.”

“Except for that.”

“How about yourself, Matt?”

I stared hard at him. “I must be missing something here,” I said levelly. “Are you really suggesting I set him up and ducked into the bathroom so some gunman I’d hired could come in and start blasting?”

“Take it easy. . . .”

“Because that’s so far off base I didn’t even know how to react to it.”

“Easy,” he said. “Sit down, Matt. That’s not at all what I was getting at.”

“It’s not?”

“Not at all.”

“That’s what it sounded like.”

“Well, then, that’s my fault, because it’s not what I intended. I said ‘How about you?’ meaning is there anybody with a reason to have you hit.”

“Oh.”

“But you thought . . .”

“I know what I thought. I’m sorry I went off like that.”

“Well, you didn’t yell and scream, but your face got so dark I was afraid you were going to stroke out on me.”

“I guess I’m more exhausted than I realized,” I said. “You’re saying the shooter could have got the wrong man?”

“It’s always possible when the shooter doesn’t know the vic personally. Faber was what, a couple of years older?”

“I’m taller by a few inches, and he was heavier, and thicker in the middle. I don’t think we looked much alike. Nobody ever called me Jim by mistake, I’ll tell you that much.”

“You have any old enemies? From when you were on the job, say?”

“That’s over twenty years ago, George. I’m off the job longer than I was ever on it.”

“Well, what enemies have you made lately? You’re a PI. You working on any mob-related cases?”

“No.”

“Anything at all where you might have rubbed some hard case the wrong way?”

“Nothing,” I said. “These days I work mostly for lawyers, checking out witnesses in personal injury and product liability lawsuits. I got a kid with a computer who does most of the heavy lifting for me.”

“So you can’t think of a thing.”

“No.”

“Well, why don’t you run on home, then? Sleep on it, see what comes to you overnight. You know how it’s probably going to turn out, don’t you?”

“How?”

“Mistaken identity. I got a feeling what happened, and God knows it wouldn’t be the first time. Somebody saw your friend, mistook him for a mope who burned him in a drug deal, or dicked his wife, some damned fool thing. Or, and I’ve known of cases, there’s a contract out on some guy, some poor bastard looked nothing like your friend, and somebody spots him and drops a dime on him, and the guy who gets the call goes to the wrong fucking Chinese restaurant. He shows up at the Lucky Panda on Eighth instead of the Golden Rabbit on Seventh or the Hoo Flung Poo on Ninth.”

“Maybe.”

“The moon’s full, you know.”

“I didn’t notice.”

“Well, it’s overcast. You can’t see it, but it’s on the calendar. Tomorrow night, actually, but that’s close enough. That’s when weird shit happens.”

I remembered the moon Wednesday night, the gibbous moon. And now it was full.

“So go on home. There’s uniforms chasing down witnesses now, taking testimony from people who were on the street when it went down, or maybe looking out their windows, wondering is it ever gonna rain. You know how it works. We’ll check everything out, we’ll see what our snitches have to tell us, and if we get lucky we’ll come up with the shitbag who pulled the trigger.” He worried his chin. “It won’t bring him back, your friend,” he said, “but it’s what we do. It’s all we can do.”

 

I walked home on Ninth Avenue. I passed a few bars along the way, and each time I felt my heart race just the least little bit at the sight of them. It was an appropriate response. I couldn’t stand the movie that was playing in my head, and booze was a sure bet to drown the sound track and fade the image to black.

Here’s looking at you, Jim. Down the hatch. Bombs away. Mud in your eye, fella.

Thanks for helping me stay sober for the past sixteen years. Who’s to say I could have done it without you? And now I’ll honor your memory by forgetting everything you taught me

No, I don’t think so.

Jim stopped watching NYPD Blue when Sipowicz drank after his son’s death. What a jerk, he said. What a fucking asshole.

He can’t help it, I said. He’s just a character, all he can do is what it says in the script.

I’m talking about the writer, he said.

So I wasn’t going to pick up a drink, but I couldn’t pretend the desire wasn’t there. My eyes took note of each gin joint, each winking neon beer sign. My mouth may have watered a little. But my feet kept on walking.

I looked for the moon, the full moon, but couldn’t see it.

Anxiety grabbed me as I walked into the lobby of our building, and in the elevator I had a sudden vision of what I was going to find on the fourteenth floor. The door kicked in, furniture overturned, pictures slashed.

And worse . . .

The door was shut and locked. I rang the bell before I used my key, and Elaine was on the other side of the door when I got it open. She started to say something and stopped when she got a look at my face.

“Jim’s dead,” I said. “I got him killed.”