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housed his processing gear. Hall wasn’t around.
    I never trusted anyone else with my film. The city wouldn’t need photos of John Doe on his concrete deathbed for at least twenty-four hours. I could catch Duffy Lee later in the day.
    I rode against the wind to Dredgers Lane and chained my bike behind the house. After a minute’s play through the fence with the neighbor’s spaniel, I took another minute to survey my rebellious foliage. From time to time the yard had provided wonderful solitude. I had inherited a few shrubs and trees when I bought the place. I had planted plenty more, yanked some, granted clemency during manic redesigns, and let hard-to-get areas go berserk rather than trim with no plan. Lately the place had run amok.
    I returned the tools to their storage crate. Yard work would have to wait.
    Again, no messages. I could wait all afternoon for the phone to ring, Cahill with a story about dozing in a rental car and sleeping off the morning’s beers. Or else I’d hear from him in three days, a contrite call from Illinois, back in his North Shore home. I knew Zack well. This time I had no feel for the situation. If this were like the days when he was single, I’d get a call for a last-minute ride. I’d have eight minutes to pick him up somewhere and drop him at the airport. I’d get a hurried, nearplausible explanation for his lunatic behavior, his whereabouts for the limited time he’d been in town. We’d laugh it off, joke about it for a few years, until other episodes took its place.
    As far as I knew, those days were long gone.
    Our twenty-year friendship had begun with our assignment to the same Navy Anti-Submarine Warfare class in Key West. I was Ensign Rutledge, the rookie officer who’d arrived nearly broke, scrounged per diem for a bicycle, rented a cheap apartment, and lived a military approximation of island life. Lieutenant
Junior Grade Zachary Cahill had zoomed into town towing a ski boat behind a Corvette roadster, had billeted himself in Bachelor Officers Quarters, had eaten his evening meals at Logun’s Lobster House.
    Our school had lasted only eight weeks. Somehow it had fostered a great friendship. After my three-year hitch I returned to Key West to live in the slow lane. Zack owed the Navy five years because of his ROTC scholarship. He marked time, passed up a command assignment, got out, went straight to business graduate school, married the daughter of a former CIA agent, and took a position with a Chicago bank. He and his wife had moved to Winnetka to raise their family, and by the mid-eighties Zack was earning salaries well into six figures. By that time my primary measures of success were having an erratic income flow, a mortgage, a fantastic music collection, a year-round tan, and good health. All along we’d stayed in touch. The friendship grew. We had visited each other, traded tips on books and places to travel. We had long ago reached the point of communicating in partial sentences, sensing each other’s thoughts, expressing concerns and moods with single words.
    It made no sense to wait for a call. I gambled on American, found their local listing, and punched in the number. Posing as Zachary Cahill, I was able to confirm my ticket for the four-thirty flight and to change my seat assignment to an aisle seat. “No, Miami to Chicago is okay,” I said. “My agent got that part right. Thanks.”
    I hung up. The phone rang. Finally.
    “Rutledge.”
    “Jesse Spence here, Alex. Got a sec?”
    The wrong call. The bartender from Mangoes. “Is this about that slick who was in the restaurant?”
    “That guy who looked like a possum? No. This is about the fuckheads who trashed my apartment. I need a favor. Pictures for the insurance claim, done right. Cash under the table.”

    I explained that my day had been hectic and promised to stay that way. Spence told me that he’d come home from work to find his place vandalized. He sounded distraught.
    “You call in a