Something I haven’t thought of in years, and maybe it’s pertinent. One weekday evening, maybe six months after the resolution of the court case, we’d moved from the bedroom to the living room. She’d fixed me a cup of coffee and flavored it with a shot of Early Times, and had popped the top on a can of Tab, and said casually that she’d be leaving in a few days for a week on a yacht in the Caribbean.

  Whose yacht?

  “Some rich guy,” she said. “He’s celebrating something—grinding the faces of the poor, most likely, so he invited three friends and told them to bring somebody.”

  “And you’re somebody?”

  “This one fellow was a client, but I checked my book and it squares with my memory, which is that I only saw him three times and the last time was a year and a half ago.”

  “I guess you made an impression.”

  “I think he thinks I’m classy enough to use the right fork at meals and not embarrass him. He almost said as much. My guess is we won’t spend a lot of time making Martian cars.”

  That was shorthand. There was a joke she’d told me, a couple of Martians visit Earth, and one of the things they want to know is how human beings reproduce. A verbal description doesn’t really work, so two scientists volunteer to have sex while the visitors observe the process. And halfway through the Martians start giggling, and wind up laughing uproariously. What was so funny? “On Mars, that’s how we make automobiles!”

  “Well,” I said. “I hope the weather’s good.”

  “Just so I don’t get seasick. I don’t usually, but I did once, and it’s something you never forget. Oh, you know what you should do? While I’m gone?”

  “Cry myself to sleep?”

  “Call Connie.”

  “Connie?”

  “Connie Cooperman. She’d love it if you called.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Absolutely. She thinks you’re cute. You could have had her the night we met, if I hadn’t called dibs first.”

  “And you wouldn’t mind?”

  “I’ll be two thousand miles away throwing up over the side of the boat, and you’re gonna be with somebody, and why wouldn’t I want it to be somebody decent?”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I never did call Connie. I looked up her number once, and was on the point of dialing it when my phone rang and a snitch had something for me that couldn’t wait. And one night when I might have called her was spent taking my boys to a college basketball game in Hempstead. Hofstra was playing somebody, maybe Adelphi, and I forget why we went. I think somebody must have given me tickets.

  And, you know, the week went quickly enough. Then she was back, and we were as we’d been, though something was a little bit different. I wasn’t sure how I felt about her steering me in her best friend’s direction. It was at once a generous act, showing that she cared for what she saw as my best interests, and at the same time clear evidence that she wouldn’t mind if I slept with another woman, even with someone close to her.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I can’t seem to work out just how long it was between the time James Leo Motley headed upstate to Attica and the incident in Washington Heights that led me to end my career as an employee of the City of New York. I could probably contrive to look it up, the events at both ends of the interval are matters of public record and not hard to access. In all likelihood, I could manage it in a matter of minutes, and without leaving my desk.

  But I don’t seem to feel like looking that long and hard at that part of my life. It was probably more than a year and less than two, and in the course of those months, however many of them there were, I went on doing what I did while every aspect of my life deteriorated.

  I wouldn’t have been able to tell you as much. I realized, at least some of the time, that things were not going well. I was getting less satisfaction out of my work, and two men at the Sixth Precinct, one a desk sergeant and the other a fellow detective, had somehow taken up residence on the list of people with whom I no longer got along. I did my work, and the only notes added to my file were the occasional commendation, but my heart was not always in it, and it was hard to summon up the energy required to put in the extra hours.

  This was a new development, I’d always been the eager beaver, turning to off-the-clock work as an alternative to heading home to Syosset. If I noticed the difference, I told myself it was natural; the novelty of the gold shield had worn off, and it had become just a job. If I managed to do my job, well, that was plenty.

  I viewed both my relationships in much the same way. I was providing for my family, my wife and kids weren’t missing any meals, and if I wasn’t around much, well, how many marriages were a bed of roses? We argued more, Anita and I, and long silences marked much of our time together, but we managed to present a united front to the kids, and now and then we’d go out to dinner, and once in a while we’d find ourselves in bed together and remember that there were things one could do in a bed besides sleep.

  One night, when an extra drink or two had led to just that, I lay at her side afterward with the conviction that we’d each of us had someone else in mind throughout. I almost said as much, but she was already asleep, and moments later so was I.

  With Elaine, arguments weren’t a factor, or long silences. But I found myself calling less frequently, and when I did call she was a little less receptive. And the time we did spend together, in or out of bed, was less than it had been.

  As I said, with Motley awaiting trial we’d quit going out in public, and we never picked it up again. No dinners in quiet French or Italian restaurants, no nights catching Monk at the Five Spot or Chet Baker at Mikell’s.

  We still had sex, when I went over to her apartment, but our conversations before and after were truncated, and somehow less intimate.

  And, to the extent I took notice, I guess I saw this as inevitable. An affair, I’d have said, was not altogether unlike a marriage; in each, time played an erosive role, and sooner or later washed away the best elements.

  And what did I do with the time I wasn’t devoting to being a cop or a husband or a boyfriend?

  Well, I was spending a lot of it on West Twenty-fourth Street. I’d taken it so I’d have a place to sleep when I didn’t go home to Syosset, and I spent a lot of nights there. (I’d also had it in mind as a place to bring women, and in the several years I had the place, I’d used it all of two times for that purpose.)

  Now, though, I wasn’t just sleeping there. I’d go there when I didn’t have any place else to go, and I’d find some music on the radio, and open a bottle, and pour a drink, and when the glass was empty I’d pour another.

  I knew that solitary drinking was cause for concern if not alarm, but I also knew it had certain advantage. It was, God knows, a cost-effective alternative to drinking in bars. It spared you the company of people you’d just as soon not sit next to, let alone talk with. And, if you drank as much as you wanted, the process of getting home and to bed could be tricky. If you’d driven to wherever you were drinking, you had the choice of driving home drunk or, the following day, trying to remember where you’d left your car.

  In your own apartment, you could tune the radio to the station of your choice instead of trying not to listen to what some clown played on the jukebox. And when you’d had the evening’s last drink, the one that cuts the brain in sections, you didn’t have to worry about getting home. You were already there.

  All right, fast forward.

  There came an evening I’ve gone on about often enough in the past. For years it found its way into my qualification every time I told my story at an AA meeting, and it’s recounted in some detail in all of the early novels, to the point where I have to believe people got tired of reading about it.

  (I said as much to LB. He said it was valuable information, it supplied motivation. I suggested it was time to start leaving it out, and since then he’s mostly done so. And he confessed that in one book he has me report that I fired uphill at the robbers, and in another that they were downhill from me when I fired at them, and that two unrelated readers actually spotted this discrepancy and wrote letters pointing it out to him. Just for the record, he wondered, was it uphill or downhill? I said I didn’t remember.)

  So, briefly: One evening I finished a tour of duty, the last two hours of which I essentially stole from the city; I was still on the clock, but I’d stopped working a case and went to Twenty-fourth Street, where I ate a sandwich from the bodega on the corner and found a beer in the fridge. Then I took a nap, and when I woke up around eight-thirty I thought about driving to Syosset.

  I’d fallen asleep with the radio on, and while I was thinking about the drive they broke for a weather report, and rain was in the forecast. It never did rain that night, in the city or out on the island, but they told me it was likely to, and that made my decision for me. I didn’t want to drive clear to Syosset in a downpour, or even in a drizzle.

  I wish I hadn’t heard the forecast. I wish I’d decided the hell with it, I could drive in the rain, I was a big boy, I wouldn’t melt and neither would my car.

  I decided I wanted a drink, and I looked to see if there was a bottle in the apartment, but there wasn’t. There rarely was, those days, because an open bottle quickly became an empty bottle. There was a liquor store around the corner, and I could get there and back in ten minutes. I’d decided to do just that, to pick up a fifth of Early Times or Ancient Age or some other lower-shelf bourbon and settle in to listen to some music. Easy enough, I already had the radio on . . .

  That’s not what I did, although I’ve always wished it were.

  I’m dragging this out and can’t think why. I decided I didn’t want another night of solitary drinking, not just then. And I thought of Elaine, not for the first time, and picked up the phone and dialed her number, and got a busy signal. I could have waited five minutes and tried again, but instead I copped a quick resentment, because why did she always have to be talking to somebody else when I was trying to reach her?

  I left the apartment, I got in my car. I was driving with no destination in mind, and then I remembered a place someone had dragged me to once, way the hell uptown in Washington Heights. It was a pleasant place to spend an hour or so, it was never packed and never empty, the guy behind the stick poured a good drink, and if the jukebox ran a little more to country and western than I might have preferred, it went okay with bourbon. The only question was whether I could find the joint.

  I could, and did. The bartender remembered me, and even remembered what I drank.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  And what do I remember, really?

  When something runs in your mind for years on end, when you’ve recounted it endlessly to yourself and to others, what are you actually recalling? The event itself? Or memories of the event, reflected infinitely in an unending series of mirrors?

  Haven’t I been over this enough?

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  One more time, then.

  I didn’t see them come in. I was at a table, I’d paid for my drink at the bar and walked over to a table where a captain’s chair promised a more comfortable seat than the backless bar stool. I should have seen them come in, because I was a cop, and in that capacity I was charged with being fully aware of any room I was in—of who was in it with me, and who left, and who entered. It didn’t matter that I was off-duty. Just as I was still required to be armed, so I was still supposed to use my eyes and ears.

  But I wasn’t paying attention, not to them when they entered or to much of anything else. I suppose I was listening to whatever was playing on the jukebox, although I wasn’t paying any real attention to that, either. Then the bartender was saying, “Okay, okay,” and I looked in his direction, and I saw him facing two men with their backs to me. He was handing them something—money from the cash register, it would have been—and my mind began to register what I was seeing, the way the men were standing, a shaft of light glinting on what would have been a gun.

  Gunshots, and people crying out, and by the time I was on my feet and my gun was out of its holster the shooters were out the door. I went after them, and we were all of us outside on the street, and they ran uphill or downhill, whichever way it was, and what difference could it possibly make?

  Did one of them turn and fire at me? I sometimes think so, but can’t be sure it ever happened. It might be something I’d prefer to believe in order to justify what happened next. But whether or not it happened is about as important as the upward or downward slope of the street.

  I dropped to a knee. I cupped my right elbow in my left hand—this was before they began teaching the two-handed grip—and I saw that I had a clear shot, and I fired, and kept firing until the gun was empty, as I’d been taught early on.

  It was good shooting, you’d have to call it that. I hit both of them, killing one outright and essentially crippling the other. And it was a righteous shooting; they’d shot the bartender dead, as it turned out, and they had guns in their hands when I shot them, and there was a woman on the scene to report that they’d been shooting at me, although that kind of eyewitness testimony is ultimately no more persuasive than my own uncertain memory.

  And if that were all there was to it, I’d have been a hero cop, a man who was in the right place at the right time and did the right thing, and my life would have gone on. It would have fallen apart sooner or later, because that was the overall path I was on, but that might have taken a while. The mills of God do what they do, like it or not, but they do it in their own sweet time.

  But that wasn’t all there was to it, because my revolver held six rounds, and while four of them hit the men I’d aimed at, two did not. And one of those errant bullets bounced off something, the pavement or a stone stoop, some damned thing. Something that redirected it without slowing it down as much as one might have hoped, and it hit a little girl in the eye and went on through into her brain and killed her.

  Instantly, they said.

  Her name was Estrellita Rivera. Estrellita means Little Star. I don’t know what Rivera means, and neither does Google Translate. I don’t know what she was doing out on the street at that hour, either, but she had more right to be there than I had to shoot her.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  As far as the world was concerned—the NYPD, the press, the man on the street—I came out of it okay. The men I shot had violent criminal records, and the bartender was probably not the first person to die at their hands.

  Nobody had thought to check my blood alcohol, but I’d probably have been all right if they did. I’d bought just one drink at the bar and left it unfinished when I ran out after them. As for what I was doing in a neighborhood ginmill some eight or nine miles north of my own neighborhood, well, I was a police detective known for pursuing leads and cultivating sources on my own time. Wasn’t that explanation enough?

  I got the benefit of the doubt. Cops generally did, and I’d say they still do, more often than not. Though more so in some neighborhoods than others.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  There was no trial. One of the men I’d shot had died at the scene, which was his Get Out Of Jail Free card. The other, when he got out of the hospital, told everyone that his partner had gunned down the bartender—although ballistics evidence indicated otherwise. It didn’t really matter, the DA charged him with two counts of felony murder, and let him plead to a lesser charge that still put him away for twenty-to-life.

  Still, all of this took some time. I turned in my gun, of course, and went on leave, and there was a stretch of a couple of months when nothing happened.

  Other than drinking, which I did a lot of. I was at home in Syosset for a while, until I drove into the city and burrowed into my apartment in Chelsea. At first I left it only to walk to and from the liquor store, but liquor stores get held up all the time, just ask my Uncle Norman, and I got fixated on the notion that somebody would hold it up while I was buying my bottle of bourbon, and what would I do now that I didn’t have a gun?

  No problem. They were more than happy to deliver, and I never had to leave my apartment.

  Of course I did leave, eventually. By the time I was done I’d left everything—the job, the family. All of it.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Yesterday I spent the whole morning at my desk and didn’t write a word, just sorting out the stretch from settling in on Twenty-fourth Street and checking in thirty-three blocks uptown. I couldn’t get a handle on it, it was like trying to get a handhold on a column of cigarette smoke.

  Here’s how it might go in a movie: We see a man sitting on a sofa, drinking. Then cut to the same scene, but he’s gone three days since his last shave, and a side table that was empty before now was two empty bottles on it. Then the same scene again, but now there are four empties on the table, and one more on the floor at his feet.

  Then a montage: the entrance of a police station. A desk, onto which a hand tosses a gold shield. A man leaving the room, light glinting on the shield he’s left behind.

  And whatever else. In a car, driving eastbound on the Long Island Expressway. The same car, parked in the driveway of a modest suburban home, and the man emerges from the house with a suitcase in each hand, and walks on past the car and on down the sidewalk.

  Maybe we see him on a platform, with a train pulling into the station. Then walking through Penn Station, still carrying those suitcases. Or we skip all that and just show him getting out a taxi in front of the Hotel Northwestern. The suitcases are at his feet as he signs the registration card. They’re in his hands as he exits the little elevator and walks the length of a threadbare hall carpet to the room he’s just rented.

  He unlocks the door, brings the bags inside, puts them down, closes the door and engages the lock. It’s a small room, minimally furnished, and he walks to the single window and we see the imposing apartment building on the south side of Fifty-seventh Street and, some miles in the distance, the new twin towers of the World Trade Center.