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weekends during college. And then for six weeks two years ago. I was studying for the bar exams, and there’s a course you take just to cram for the bar. A six-week cram course. I stayed downtown at the Martinique and didn’t do a thing but eat and sleep and study. I could have been in any city for all the attention I paid to it.”
    “I didn’t know you then.”
    “No, not then. Do you know this city?”
    She shook her head. “I have an aunt who lives here. A sister of my father’s. She never married, and she has a job in the advertising department for one of the big department stores. Had, anyway. I don’t know if she still does, I haven’t seen her in years. Name some department stores.”
    “Jesus, I don’t know. Saks, Brooks Brothers—”
    “She wouldn’t work at Brooks Brothers.”
    “Well, I don’t know anything about department stores. Bonwit? Is there one called Bonwit?”
    “It was Bergdorf Goodman. I remember now. We went to visit her, oh, two or three times. I was just a kid then. We didn’t see her very often because my mother can’t stand her. Do you think she might be a lesbian?”
    “Your mother?”
    “Oh, don’t be an idiot. My aunt.”
    “How do I know?”
    “I wonder. There was a lesbian in my dormitory in college.”
    “You told me.”
    “She wanted to make love to me. Did I tell you that, too?”
    “Yes.”
    “Everybody said I should have reported her, but I didn’t I wonder if Aunt Beth is a lesbian.”
    “Call her up and ask her.”
    “Some other time. Dave?” Her face was serious now. “I think we ought to figure out what we’re going to do first. How we’re going to find them, the two men. We don’t know anything about them.”
    “We know a few things.”
    “What?”
    He had a notebook in his jacket pocket, a small loose-leaf notebook for appointments and memos. He sat down in an armchair and flipped the book open to a blank page. He took his pencil and wrote: “Joe Carroll.”
    “They killed a man named Joe Carroll,” he said. “That’s a start” She nodded, and he said, “If that was his name.”
    “Huh?”
    “That was the name he gave us, and that was the name he used at the lodge. But he was running away, trying to hide. He might not have used his own name.”
    “What did the men call him?”
    “I don’t remember. I don’t think they called him anything. I couldn’t hear that much from where we were.”
    “Wouldn’t the police know his real name?”
    “The troopers?” He thought a minute. “He might have had some identification on him. They called him Carroll. They might have done that in front of us just to keep from confusing us, but maybe not Or maybe he wasn’t carrying any identification.”
    “Or maybe they took his wallet with them.”
    “Maybe.” He lit a cigarette. “But they would fingerprint him,” he said. “They would do that much automatically, and they would send his prints to Washington, to the FBI. If he’s ever been fingerprinted, then, his prints would be on file and they would get a positive identification of him.”
    “How could we find out?”
    “If he’s important, then it would be in the New York papers. If not, it would just be in the local papers. If Pomquit has a paper. Or one of larger cities around there. Scranton—I don’t know.”
    “Can you get Scranton papers in New York?”
    “Yes. There’s a newsstand in Times Square. I used to pick up Binghamton papers during that bar-exam stretch. The papers run late, but they would have them.”
    In the notebook he wrote: “Scranton paper.”
    He looked up. “Let’s take it from the top. Carroll, whatever his name is, said he was in construction. And semiretired.”
    “He was probably just talking.”
    “Maybe. People usually stay close to the truth when they lie. Especially when they’re lying just for the sake of convenience. Carroll wanted to be friendly with us, and he had to invent a story, not to keep anything from us, specifically, but because