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winner and paid $43.20 to win. Mooney had won slightly more than four thousand dollars.

6
    He had found her in a bar on Forty-ninth Street, the Spanish girl who disrobed for him, then took off his clothing, washed him, sat on his lap and dangled her breasts in his face. Laughing, she darted her tongue in and out of his ear, and squeezed him. Mooney lay back, accepting these attentions with an odd, almost gloomy reserve.
    She was no more than eighteen or nineteen. Sweet and quite affectionate. Sympathetic to his size, and quickly grasping his problem, she knew how to make it all easy for him. Setting atop his pelvis, graceful and pert like a sparrow primping in a birdbath, she aroused him with her hands and mouth.
    The embarrassment she sensed he felt, gross and naked before her made her doubly solicitous. She called him “Poppy” and kissed him over and over again, as if she truly meant it. Determined to please him, she was still young enough in the trade not to have had the last ounce of human tenderness flayed out of her.
    At last, when it came time to culminate his pleasure, she sat astride him, then proceeded to move up and down, rotating her hips as she went. Eyes closed, Mooney lay dazed and panting in the overheated room that reeked of perspiration and cheap incense.
    Slowly the motion continued, gathering momentum, peaking finally for Mooney with a long rush of release. The girl, sighing and moaning, might have been merely simulating passion, making him feel as though he’d given her more pleasure than she’d ever known. He may have half-suspected this was the case. In any event, when he left there somewhere in the early part of Sunday evening, several thousand dollars bulging in his pockets, he was, for the moment at least, at peace.
    Mooney had little in the way of religious feelings. Spiritual intimations were not his strong suit. Only in the presence of the evening sky did he feel some vague, troublesome notion of things stirring outside himself. Call it wonder. If it was, he did not perceive it as such. He did not consciously go out on evenings to encounter deities. All he knew was that on rare occasions when he found himself gazing upward at the starry vault of heaven, he experienced a sharp anger in the face of stubborn puzzles intimating things that, in more guarded moments, he brusquely discounted. And of course it is axiomatic that detectives loathe insoluble puzzles.
    Still, wonder notwithstanding, he watched the stars, knew the evening sky and could read it like his own newspaper. On the rooftop, where he stood now, leaning on the brick parapet, he watched Virgo recumbent in the southeastern sky; Draco looped and coiled above his head with Bootes, the Plowman, just to the left, and Arcturus glowing like a beacon in its tail. Mooney patted the bulge of dollars swelling in the pocket above his breast, leaned far out over the edge, and peered down into the teeming nighttime life swarming below him.
    It was nearly 11:00 P.M. Theaters were just beginning to let out, disgorging their audiences onto the street. Horns blared, taxis streamed crosstown and up Eighth Avenue. The marquees were still lit, setting the sky above the theater district ablaze. Even at the seven-story elevation, Mooney could feel the bustle and heat of mortal nervous energy emanating from below. From where he stood, he reasoned another man had stood six nights ago, at the same time and in that precise spot. No doubt, that man had stood at the ledge, just as Mooney did now, and peered down into the swarming dizzy tide of life below.
    What occupied the detective’s attention was a shallow pit in the outside wall just below him, where a slab of concrete had either fallen of its own accord or was chiseled out of the brick facade. Mooney leaned way over, hanging head down from the waist, as if nailed inverted to the wall and probed the damaged area with his stubby fingers.
    The forensic unit that had examined the spot two days before had