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asked.
    “Kind of a runny nose,” I replied.
    He regarded me for another moment and said, “Even as a sympathetic character you’re still a complete jackass.”
    “Thank you.”
    More silence. Pam came over and took our orders. I asked for a turkey sandwich and a Coke. Vinny ordered a butterflied filet mignon with an extra-large baked potato with a side of creamy spinach. He was supposedly doing that Atkins thing, in that he was eating all the meat he could get his hands on, but I’m not so sure he realized you have to cut out the carbs on the other side of the ledger.
    Regarding Vinny, he’s huge, and I don’t mean huge like Tom Brady is huge — tall and broad-shouldered and all that. I mean huge like a wooly mammoth is huge, only a whole lot woolier. The guy didn’t so much have hair on his arms, but fur. His skin always had a sheen to it. His chocolate-colored eyes were the size of doughnuts. His odor was that of a pizza parlor.
    And his heart, when you got beyond everything else, was the size of a boulder, though that may not have been in evidence on this day.
    He said to me, “I don’t mean to speak out of school, Jack, but Maggie’s smart, she’s gorgeous, she’s got a body with curves like the Tour de France, and she loves you. You’ve probably freaked her out without even realizing it. You can salvage this thing.”
    Could I? That question was becoming increasingly more bothersome to me than the other particularly obvious one, which was,
Did I want to?
    And there was another nagging question as well: How many good women come along in a single life? I had Katherine, who was the greatest woman I’ll ever know, and the only one I’d wanted to raise children with. There was the alluring Samantha Stevens, perhaps more of a rebound woman than anything else. Of course there was Elizabeth Riggs, who I continued to think about every single day, a woman I undoubtedly would have married but for my inability to get over Katherine’s death. And now Maggie Kane. I’m not sure what went wrong there, with either of us.
    Time to change the subject.
    The food was delivered to the table, mine by Pam, and Vinny’s by a team of University Club servers carrying his various plates and trays, along with a decanter filled with a maroon-colored wine.
    I asked, “What do you know about the Jill Dawson murder?”
    Mongillo surveyed all that was his, from the steak to the baked potato to the spinach to what he announced was a Frog’s Leap Cabernet. Then he looked at me and said, “The same as everybody else outside of BPD. Very little.”
    He cut his steak in half and checked the center to see how it was cooked. Pam waited by his side to make sure everything was okay. Nobody asked me whether my turkey was properly roasted.
    Vinny said, “Found dead in her Beacon Hill apartment on January third. Case unsolved, last that I know. Police are being even more tight-lipped about this one than usual. They ain’t even talking to me. And the people who usually whisper about these things aren’t whispering about these things.”
    I don’t know who those people were, but still found this interesting. I took a bite of my sandwich, realized what little desire I had to eat, and put it down. Meantime, Mongillo attacked his steak as if it were about to attack him. I was just hoping that no strangers approached the table unannounced and lost a finger or a limb for their mistake.
    So I told him about the license and the note and my call to the cops. He whistled a low little whisper, actually put down his fork for a moment, and said, “Prediction: You and I are about to embark on a wild ride.”
    You and I.
For some reason I liked that just then, though I wasn’t exactly sure why. We talked about the story, or lack thereof, for a while longer. He did little to hide his disappointment when I informed him that I didn’t have time for dessert, advised me to leave a good tip when the bill came, and concluded, “Well, even if you didn’t