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“Could be.” He chuckled. “Wanted to know what I’d go on the three pips, in advance. So I says, ‘I don’t shop.’ And the party looks all smug and says, ‘Going to highest bidder. So you’re not bidding?’ I says, ‘Show me the swag, then we talk. I don’t shop.’ I’m like worried this whole time that somehow this is a setup, that I’m eating a bagel with a cop.”

“So what happened?”

“‘Fair enough,’ she says, and makes for the door.”

“So this is a woman?” There aren’t a boatload of women in the art theft world. Some, like Gloria the locksmith, but few.

“She’s not exactly new to the art world. I know her provenance. C’mon.” Jo-Ball’s eyes laughed at my confusion. He slid out from behind the table and gestured toward the front door. “We can’t talk here. Let’s walkie talkie.”

I headed for the sunlit glass front of Donut House, inspecting the line of customers at the counter. Which customer was making Jo-Ball nervous? There were three of them.

Only the old man eating a soft-boiled egg was there when I came in. His chin came within an inch of his nose when he chewed: no teeth. The other two were an Arab buck in a trench coat dunking a tea bag, and a pug-nose woman in her thirties poking at her BlackBerry. She looked up at me, then Jo-Ball, then back down at her machine.

We got outside and glanced back at the diner. Nobody following. “So, the old man with the soft-boiled egg, you figure him for a shooter?”

“Hey, I’m the guy that’s been shot, so don’t make fun.” Jo-Ball was zipping up his jacket.

His face exploded.

Yeah, I mean exploded. Like an M-80 stuffed in a watermelon. He was facing the street, so the blood and meat and bone splattered all over a town car idling at the curb, the limo driver reading a paper inside.

All that was left of Johnny One-Ball’s head was the bottom jaw. The bloody tongue was wiggling around in the air like it was looking for the roof of the mouth. A second later his body collapsed forward, denting the town car’s passenger door. Blood gushed from his neck into the gutter.

Inside the limo, the driver was bouncing around in a panic, Jo-Ball’s bloody toupee sliding down his windshield.

I stood there like an idiot, my mouth hanging open, trying to get a grip on what just happened. Shit like that goes down so fast, and is so screwy, it takes you a couple long seconds to deal with what you’ve just seen, and to do something about it.

I remember my first reaction was to touch the roof of my mouth with my tongue, and be glad I felt something. That’s when my brain unfroze.
There might be another bullet for me
.

Something like an angry bumblebee zipped past my cheek as I jumped back toward the diner.

The second bullet thonked into the light pole. I scrambled my way through the glass doors into Donut House. I found myself on the floor in front of the counter with the woman and the Arab, both of them cursing in different languages about the mess outside. The old man was still eating his egg at the counter, smacking his rubbery lips.

I hadn’t heard any shots.

I hadn’t seen any shooter.

Just the same, I knew it was a sniper’s bullet that took out Jo-Ball’s head.

POP USED TO SAY THAT
men are like rhinoceroses. They mostly stand alone, can’t see much farther than themselves, and can be grumpy. I am, anyway. Plus they have these little birds that stand around on them that they don’t know whether they should be concerned about or not.

Every guy has his appetites. Some spend their whole lives trying to shake them off; others accept and indulge them. May the little birds of bacon, brandy, and broads forever roost on my shoulders.

The way I see it, these appetites make life more than just tolerable. Hey, if you’re not going to live a little, you might as well be dead, am I right?

This is all sort of a screwy way of explaining that after Jo-Ball’s head exploded, and after I spent hours waiting to be interviewed by police detectives, I headed directly for Delilah. She was my masseuse, like I think I mentioned.

Delilah had an apartment in Brooklyn Heights, which is closer to Manhattan than Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill. It’s across the river from downtown, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Funny thing, though, is that a lot of the best part of Brooklyn Heights, where the buildings have a view of the bridge and Lower Manhattan, is almost totally owned and occupied by the Watchtower Society. Jehovah’s Witnesses, people with almost no appetites at all. They live and work there. In the morning, you see them come out of their apartment buildings—happy, calm, and glassy-eyed. Two by two like animals from the ark, they exit their apartment buildings in their Sunday best. They’re walking a few blocks to the big-ass factory buildings where they make the religious pamphlets handed out at subway stops. At five, they file two by two out of the pamphlet factories the three blocks back into their apartments.

Is it just me, or is this creepy? Like pod people or something. Normal people in the neighborhood call them “zooks.” I’m guessing that’s a combination of zombie and spook, but I don’t know for sure.

Delilah’s apartment is in one of their buildings, right at the water on Columbia Place. How she manages this, since she is obviously not a zook, I’m not sure. Maybe one or more of the zooks let this bird rest on their shoulder.

So when I go to see my masseuse, I have to pretend I am a zook so I don’t blow her cover at the front desk. When I pass a zook handing out pamphlets on the street, I always collect a recent one. It helps with the disguise. I go to the zook at the front desk of her building holding the pamphlet and smile like a brain-dead pod person. That’s right, I look like a moron, but to the zooks, this is normal. They ring Delilah’s apartment and let me go up.

As soon as I stepped through the door she could see I was pretty stressed out.

She says, “Tom, what’s with you?”

So I says, “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. But I will. Just not this second.”

So she went to work on me straight away, and after I started to relax, I blurted out most of the story. I had already told her I was shopping and settling at the same time. I did that because she’s not the judgmental type.

Delilah didn’t say anything, just listened and did her thing. She’s not a small woman, and by that I mean she’s tall like me and muscular. She doesn’t have much if any fat on her. I’m one of those Budweiser horses; she’s one of those horses at the track. Except she has a long brown braid and almond eyes, like she’s part Oriental. Maybe she is. She was wearing a kimono. But that didn’t mean anything. I was wearing one, too.

When we were finished, she poured me a glass of pinot, and we sat across from each other at the Scrabble board. We played nine-tile Scrabble whenever I came over, for an hour at most. The game had been started the week before, and we were each five words into the game. My last word had been “furtive” and I attached it on the end of her last word, “spin,” to create “spine.” I scored eighty points on that play because I used seven letters and got a fifty-point bingo. That’s huge. During the week, she’d played “fecund” off of my
f
for thirty-six using the triple word space. Fecund means fertile, like soil, or a girl that gets pregnant real easy.

Delilah still hadn’t said a word about what I’d told her, and waited for me to take my turn first, which didn’t take long because I already had a number of moves figured out in advance. Though I was relaxed, I was still emotionally numb as I clicked my tiles in place.

I spelled out “deluxe” using her
d
and picked up a double word space for twenty-eight points.

Her dark eyes looked up from the Scrabble board. “So have you heard from Yvette?”

I didn’t expect that question. So I says, “I didn’t expect that question. No. Thank God.”

“How long she been gone?”

“Four weeks.”

“Miss her?”

“Good riddance.”

“So what about the cats?”

My eyes met hers, and she held up her hands. “I’m just asking, Tom. But I guess the question is why someone shot Johnny. What do you think?”

So I says, “Jo-Ball had people pissed off at him all the time. No, I think the question is why the shooter took a shot at me. Was he just trying to tidy up? Or had he missed me with the first shot and hit Jo-Ball by accident?”

Delilah’s eyes rolled back to her tiles as she moved them around on her tile pew searching for a word. “What you’re telling me is you don’t have an answer to either question.”

I finished my wine. “It’s early.”

“Answers are sometimes more dangerous than the question, Tom.”

“There’s not a lot of options here, Dee.” I went in search of the wine bottle, and when I got back with it, she says, “There are only as many options as you allow there to be.”

I had to laugh at that. “Bullshit. Life is no different than the tiles you pick in Scrabble. Sometimes you pick all vowels. No seven-letter bingo with a pew of all vowels.”

“You can at least be creative with the tiles you’re dealt.” She carefully laid out the word “extract” and batted those dark almond eyes at me.

“Cute trick—and that’s all that is, a cute trick. My problem is this thing with Jo-Ball has put a lot of negative energy into my business. Him getting tweaked is going to make all the goofballs dive for cover, including the ones who took my goodies. I have to use all my positive energies to find out who took the paintings from me, try to recover those assets. My business was counting on that money. More important than that, other businesses are counting on that money.”

Delilah fixed her eyes on me, head to one side, but I kept looking at my tiles.

She says, “Other businesses?”

I didn’t look up and didn’t say anything.

I share a lot with Delilah, but there are certain things a man needs to keep to himself, especially things a man isn’t proud about. Or that make him feel like a sucker. The truth was that I was in for some serious money on account of Yvette. Like a moron, I bailed her out, and not just to a landlord, but to a kind of a bad Vegas dude who took over her debt to the landlord. So I had to take a short-term loan. A loan from an individual, not a bank, if you get my drift. A guy not too unlike the guy I had to pay off, but at least a Brooklyn shylock, name of Vince Scanlon.

So she finally says, “I can lend you some money, Tom, if it will keep you from getting killed.”

I smiled like I was sad. Which I was, to be honest. Sad because I thought I could help Yvette, sad because Delilah thought she could help me. “If it was enough to help, Dee, it would be more than I’d be willing to hit you up for.”

“You big sucker.” She smiled like she was happy. “Too gallant for your own good. Come on.” I turned and watched her slip into the bathroom.

“Where we going?” I stood, thinking maybe I was in for another massage.

Delilah came out with a towel, a scissors, and a razor. She waved a hand at one of the dining room chairs. “Sit.”

I got all squinty. “What’s this about, Dee? I don’t need no haircut.”

“You need a shave.”

My hand covered my beard like it might slide off. “Shave?”

“We’re going to shave it all off.”

“Shave?” Now both my hands were protecting my beard. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Thomas…” Whenever she uses my full name, I know she won’t take no for an answer. “Indulge me. You need a new look, a fresh perspective, and the way to start is with a clean face.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

She guided me into a chair and draped a towel around my neck.

“You big dummy. Without a beard you’ll be less recognizable.” There were snipping sounds, and black and silver clumps of hair fell on the white towel. “Let’s say the sniper was targeting you. Do you think he and whoever hired him had a picture, maybe a description? First part of that description will be the beard. Take that away and you at least have a little advantage. Besides, you’ll be a lot more handsome without the spinach chin. You may want to lose the suits for a while, too.”

The grumpy squint left my eyes. “Oh, I see what you’re talking about. I ever tell you you’re smart, Dee?”

So she says, “Say it with flowers, bub.”

THE WHITBREAD MUSEUM WAS MY
next stop. I had my own reasons for the visit, of course, but Maxie was expecting me to interview the guards. They came back on duty at seven o’clock, and between losing my goodies, Jo-Ball’s head exploding, the cops, and the massage, my day had already been pretty much eaten up.

You would think people who owned a museum would have good artistic sense, wouldn’t you? Then why was it that the trustees at the Whitbread approved the redesign of the stately museum facade and entrance to include a flying saucer?

Of course, when I say flying saucer, it only looked like one. A grand marble stair used to soar up to huge doors. Like a bank, or on a Greek deli coffee cup. Someone had the bright idea to rip that out and shove a massive glass disc entryway at ground level. I can’t tell you how stupid this disc looks smashed into a dignified building. Everybody who passes by thinks so, too, I kid you not.

The museum was closed, and a sign said so, but I knew a door in the saucer that was always open for the change of the guards. One of the day-shift guards approached me. He gnashed his dentures at me, tugging on his belt.

“Closed, pal. We closed at five.”

“Freddy, it’s me, Tommy Davin.”

Freddy looked stuck with a pin from two directions. At least the dentures didn’t pop out and land on the floor. Almost, though.

“Fucking aye, Tommy. No more spinach chin. I didn’t know who you was.”

“I know. Looks strange. Feels strange.” I moved my naked jaw side to side and missed the comforting crunch of whiskers on my neck.

Freddy leaned in close and pointed. He smelled faintly of sour beer and Tic Tacs.

“Kirk Douglas,” he says.

“Kirk Douglas?”

“Did you know you have a cliff chin? Kirk Douglas: He had a cliff chin.” He pointed to his chin, and his hand trembled just a little bit. Some of the other guards called him Unsteady Freddy. There was a tightness to his eyes that along with his particular aroma tipped that he was a boozer.