After they left I checked Elaine’s appointment book. I started to copy down the name and number of a Mrs. Federenko, then simplified things by calling the woman myself. I told her I was calling for Mrs. Scudder, who wouldn’t be able to look at the icons tomorrow because the shop was closed until further notice.

That’s what it said, too, on the sheet of paper she’d given me, which I taped to the inside of the window. I left a new message on the shop’s answering machine: “Thank you for calling Elaine Scudder Art and Antiques. The shop is closed until further notice.”

I pulled the gates shut and headed uptown. When I got to Fifty-seventh Street I called TJ and said I wanted to talk to him. He offered to come down, and I said to stay where he was, that I’d be right up. I crossed the street and went into the lobby of the old hotel. Vinnie was still working there, he’d had that job for thirty years that I knew about, and he just gave me a nod and didn’t even bother calling to let TJ know I was coming. For all I know, he may have been under the impression that I still lived there. God knows I’d put in enough time in that little room.

“You didn’t have to come up,” TJ told me. A game of computer solitaire filled the screen, and he saw what I was looking at and turned it off. “Wall Street’s been closed since four o’clock,” he said, “and I dumped everything before three. Had a wild ride.”

“Oh?”

“When did I get up here this morning? Whenever it was, there’s this stock I been watching, an’ it made a move, you know, it broke through this particular price point, so I bought some. An’ it went up.”

“Isn’t that what it was supposed to do?”

“Yeah, well, they don’t always be doin’ what they supposed to do. So it’s movin’ up an’ movin’ up, an’ I pop in this trailing stop-loss order, so if it goes down I’ll be out of it, but each time it goes up a notch the stop-loss order goes up a notch with it, an’ you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, do you?”

“I get a general idea.”

“Well, it kept runnin’ up like that for, I don’t know, two hours? An’ then it came back down a bit, an’ when it hit my stop-loss order I didn’t have to do nothin’, I was out of it automatically. They already had my order an’ they sold me out. An’ then of course the stock turns around an’ heads back up, an’ I’m like, wha’d I do that for? An’ then I’m like, should I buy more?”

“You’re talking like a Valley Girl.”

“I am?” He frowned. “Don’t want to do that. What I did, I told myself to be cool, and it was a good thing, because it turned around and went all the way back down, an’ it finished the day two whole points below where I bought it at in the first place.”

“So you did all right.”

“I did real good. They want to print up a list of contented stockholders, they can put my name on it.”

“What’s the company?”

“I dunno. Trading symbol’s NFI. I never did find out the name of it.”

“Do you know what they do?”

“No.”

“Doesn’t any of that matter?”

“Not if you ain’t gonna own it for more’n two hours. But we can have a look.” He picked up a newspaper, ran his eyes down the stock table. “Name’s Novastar. Pays a nice dividend, must be a REIT or a MLP. Course you got to own it a little longer’n I did to collect the dividend. Who’s that there? That ain’t Louise’s boyfriend, is it?”

“You don’t think it’s a good likeness?”

“Don’t look like the man I saw.”

“This is someone else,” I said. “This is the man who killed Monica.”

After I’d brought him up to speed, the two of us went across the street. It seemed to me that at least one of us should be with Elaine whenever possible. I couldn’t be sure she was his primary target, and for all I knew he’d killed Monica and got on the next plane to Las Vegas, but until they ran him down and caught him I wasn’t taking any chances. The way it looked to me, the man was the worst possible combination, an off-the-page homicidal maniac with an incisive, methodical mind. You couldn’t wait for him to do something stupid, nor could you expect him to behave logically. He was crazy like a rabid fox, and all you could do was hope he ran out in front of a car.

Around seven I went around the corner and picked up dinner from the Chinese restaurant. We usually call down and have them deliver, but deliveries weren’t part of the new regimen. No one was getting upstairs but the three of us, and if that meant a little extra coming and going, I figured I could live with that.

I ordered more food than we were likely to eat, and I guess that too was part of the siege mentality we were operating under. “I guess I won’t be going out of the house much,” Elaine said, wielding her chop-sticks, and I told her she wouldn’t be going out of the house at all. She let herself get used to the idea, then picked up another piece of the coconut beef.

I asked TJ if he owned a gun. He didn’t, and neither did I. A few years ago Mick Ballou and I had been at war with a gang that had taken up residence at his farm upstate in Sullivan County, and we’d gone out there armed and did a decade’s worth of shooting in a matter of minutes. I hadn’t had a gun in my hand since that night.

“If you had a gun,” I said, “would you know how to use it?”

“Learning curve can’t be too steep,” he said. “Some of the stupidest dudes I ever met did just fine at it.”

“What about you?” I asked Elaine. “Would you use a gun?”

“Would I use one?”

“If he got up here,” I said, “and you were alone, or he got past whoever was here with you. Could you pick up a gun and shoot him?”

“It’s like a no-brainer camera, right? Point and shoot? I’d point it and shoot it.”

“If he was just standing here, say. No weapon in his hands and an explanation on his lips, telling you how it wasn’t his doing, some other man stole the letter opener from him, and—”

“In other words, he’s not coming at me. He’s acting like a gentleman. Could I shoot him anyway? I swear I don’t know where you got the idea that I’m some kind of shrinking violet. We’re talking about the prick that killed my friend. Would I shoot him? He could be lying on this couch taking a nap and if I had a gun I’d blow his fucking brains out. You’re gonna go get some guns?”

“I’m going to try.”

“Get three,” she said. “One for each of us. No more Mr. Nice Guy.”