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the one that stuck with me was Len Trumaine on the
Lessing case. Cindy had the same blasted look on her face that
Trumaine had had on his—the look of someone who has stepped right
through the crust of the world.
    Cindy didn’t say a word as the cruiser blew down an
exit ramp and headed straight into the lower east side. She was going
to see a terrible thing, and she knew it. She was girding herself for
it. There was very little I could do to make it any less terrible,
except to be there with her.
    The cruiser bucked as we rounded Fourth Street,
throwing Cindy against my shoulder. The jolt seemed to rock her out
of her trance.
    "He’s going to look awful, isn’t he?"
she said in a sick voice.
    I said, "What he looks like doesn’t matter to
him. It happens after someone dies."
    "I’ve seen this in movies. It feels like we’re
in a movie. Only I can’t get up and leave."
    "That’s a pretty fair description."
    Cindy bent toward me, lowering her voice until it was
just a bitter, heartbroken whisper. "They were laughing at him,
Harry."
    "Who was?"
    "Those cops. They were laughing at him because
he was a homosexual."
    "How did they know that?"
    She shook her head. "They knew." She
started to weep. "It’s like he didn’t matter because he was
gay."
    We were on Main Street by then. A block later, the
cruiser jerked to a stop beneath the wrought-iron arcade of the
Washington Hotel. There was an ambulance parked just ahead of us. The
cops had set up sawhorses on either side of the hotel door to block
off the pedestrian flow. A few lunchtime bystanders were stacked up
on either side of the obstacles, wondering what all the fuss was
about. Jack McCain turned in the seat.
    "Can you do this now, Ms. Dorn?" he asked
gently.
    Cindy raised her head from my chest. "I guess I
have to, right?"
    "It may help us find out what happened."
    Drawing herself up on the bench seat, Cindy nodded
sharply. "Then I’m ready."
    McCain opened the back doors of the cruiser, and we
stepped out into the brilliant midday sun. Side by side we walked out
of the sunlight into the darkness of the old hotel.
    A narrow wainscoted hallway led to the clerk’s
desk—a booth on the left-hand wall. Beyond it the hall opened into
the lobby proper, which in the Washington Hotel was little more than
a dingy common room lined with secondhand chairs and benches. An old
man in a stained shirt and yellow rayon slacks sat on one of the
benches, resting his dazed-looking head in his hands. He had a red,
heavily weathered face, with a band of paper white around his
forehead, where a cap had shielded his head from the sun. In front of
him a small portable TV, propped on an old mahogany table, flashed
silent pictures. The place smelled of dust and mildew and old, tired
men.
    A stout, genial-looking man in his midfifties came
out from behind the reception desk. He was wearing a T-shirt and
khaki trousers and had a Reds cap on his head.
    "Are you going to want to be going back up
there?" he said to McCain.
    "Yeah. One more trip."
    "C’mon, then."
    The clerk led us over to the open door of an elevator
to the left of the reception desk.
    "Keep an eye on things, will ya, Pat?" he
called back to the man on the bench. Without taking his eyes off the
TV, the guy raised one hand to acknowledge that he’d gotten the
message.
    "Christ, I don’t know about Pat," the
clerk said with a nervous laugh. "It’s like he’s wired to
that damn box."
    McCain and I stepped into the elevator. The fat clerk
helped Cindy Dorn through the doors.
"Are
you a relative of the deceased, ma’am‘?" he said with
surprising gentleness.
    "I was his friend."
    "I’m very sorry," the man said.
    He tipped his cap, smoothing down the thin gray hair
underneath it before reseating it on his head.
    The clerk threw a switch, and the elevator lurched up
with a sound of rattling chains.
    "What floor is he on?" Cindy said in a
distant voice.
    "He’s on five, ma’am. All the way to the
top. When he checked in