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sure; I never had another brother, and we were so young when he died.”
    “Have you ever worried about him dying young?” Nudger asked. “I mean, aren’t identical twins genetically the same, so that their organs are subject to the same weaknesses, the same diseases?”
    “It never worried me, Nudge,” Danny said with that same sad smile that Nudger had never seen before today. “Sammy was hit and killed by a car.”
    “I see.” Nudger sipped his coffee, burned his tongue, decided he had it coming. “I’m sorry to pry, Danny.”
    Danny shrugged and tucked his gray dish towel into his belt. “Been a long time ago, Nudge.”
    But not so long that it didn’t still bring pain, Nudger thought. And Jeanette Boyington had lost her twin sister only last week.
    “You mixed up in a case with twins?” Danny asked.
    “ ‘Mixed up’ describes what I am exactly.”
    “Well, I’ll help you if I can. You know that, don’t you?”
    “I know,” Nudger said. And he did know. Some things you don’t doubt.
    “That all you wanted, Nudge?” Danny asked.
    “That and this,” Nudger said, and girded himself and took a bite of the stale doughnut. He watched with satisfaction the slow formation of Danny’s customary amiable smile.
    Outside the doughnut-shop window, a hulking man in a tan windbreaker and a bright yellow, billed cap was squinting through the glass at Nudger. His coarse features—flattened nose, shelflike eyebrows, outthrust wide jaw—registered subtle satisfaction as he impressed Nudger’s face upon his memory. He would know Nudger instantly if he saw him again, anywhere.
    He turned from the doughnut-shop window and lumbered halfway down the street to where his car was parked.
    It was a brown ten-year-old Buick, faded and rusty and as hulking as its owner. As the man got behind the steering wheel and slammed the door, the rearview mirror wobbled and dropped to a crooked position from the impact. He started the car and pulled away from the curb, and was only a few blocks away when he automatically reached for a small red rubber ball on the seat beside him. He began to squeeze the ball rhythmically as he drove, exercising the already powerful forearm rippling beneath the windbreaker sleeve.
    As he stopped for a traffic light, he glanced down at the ball expanding and contracting between his fingers and figured that it was probably just about the size of Nudger’s Adam’s apple. He smiled, not at all with his eyes, and with only one corner of his mouth.
    Then the light changed and for the time being he completely forgot about Nudger. Squeezing the ball and driving occupied his entire capacity for concentration.
    V
    other has always been a snoop and an interloper,” Jeanette said, later that day in Nudger’s office. Nudger made a tent with his fingers, just like Sidney Greenstreet used to do in Bogart movies, and stared candidly at Jeanette. “I’m playing this game honestly with you,” he said. “Which is why I told you about your mother’s visit. And I need complete honesty from you. What’s the name of the man who got Jenine pregnant and beat up on you?”
    “Wally. Wallace Everest. But he didn’t.”
    “Didn’t what?”
    Jeanette uncrossed her shapely legs, planted her dainty silver high heels firmly on the floor, and aimed eyes like her mother’s at Nudger. “You wanted honesty, and that’s what you’re going to get.” She made it sound like a threat, and maybe it was. “Mother doesn’t know everything. She doesn’t know that I was the one seeing Wally, the one he made pregnant, the one who had the abortion.”
    “Prolong the honesty and explain,” Nudger said.
    “I’d been seeing Wally for several months. When he found out I was expecting his baby, he was angry instead of happy. He said he was leaving me and never wanted to see me again. Then he suggested the abortion. When I cried on Jenine’s shoulder and told her what had happened, she came up with a plan.”
    There were