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direct as her photographs. She didn't flinch or blink when he looked her in the eye.
    "Sorry about this morning. I didn't mean to be so abrupt."
    "That's okay. I was glad when you came over. I didn't know anyone there and I felt kind of outside the thing. But I wanted to be there anyway."
    "You and Al were pretty close, I guess."
    "Is that a question or a fact?"
    "Neither. More like a feeble query."
    "We were friends. I liked him. He liked me."
    "Not lovers?"
    "No, we weren't. It could have gone that way, at least maybe in Al's mind, but not in mine and I made my feelings clear. We gave each other signals and after that we settled down. He used to come by afternoons. He liked to sit around and talk. I liked listening to him. He talked about his work and I talked about mine. Sometimes when I was working in the darkroom he'd just sit out here reading magazines. It was good to have him around. We enjoyed each other's company. And that's all there was."
    So—they just sat around and talked afternoons; they were friends and nothing more. He believed her, had no reason not to, but still, he thought, it was a curious relationship, the old beat-up depressed retired cop and this very attractive, no-nonsense young female photographer.
    "You really liked him?"
    "He was a great guy. Told terrific stories. Loved talking about his old cases, and he had a lot of good ones to talk about. He was a real person. That's what I liked. And I guess, too, he reminded me a little of my dad. Maybe that's what we had going—a sort of father-daughter thing." She looked up at him. "I'm the daughter of a cop."
    "NYPD?"
    She nodded.
    "So we're part of the same family."
    "Guess we are. You, me, Al, and maybe one hundred thousand other people too."
    "You said Al mentioned me."
    She nodded. "He liked you very much. He was your rabbi, he told me, and I knew what that meant: the guy who watched out for you and gave you advice when you started out. He was proud of you, Janek , that you'd done so well and made lieutenant, even after that business with your partner. He said you took a lot of static over that but that you rebounded from the tragedy and turned into one of the best detectives around. He said you understood people and that's what being a detective was all about. He said you were better than he'd ever been, but maybe not so great as you liked to think."
    "He really said all that?" Janek was surprised at how smoothly she poured it out. And, too, that Al had told her about Terry, and had used the word "tragedy"—the very word he had denied to him while standing that morning by his grave.
    "He said you were very good, but you thought you were better than very good."
    He laughed. "I'm not sure I ever thought I was all that great."
    She laughed, too. "Well, maybe Al was wrong."
    A pause. Their eyes met. Then he asked her about her work. She'd done two books, she said, the first when she was starting out, a very emotional collection of stuff she'd shot in Vietnam. She'd gone out there practically as a novice. "I was very ambitious, I wanted it all. I wanted to win the Pulitzer Prize. I stayed a couple years, made good contacts, got pampered a lot by the press corps and the military because I was a woman. I was lucky. Nothing happened to me. I know now I was reckless, but back then I thought I was blessed. Anyway, the book got good notices and when I came back here I wanted to try something different, so I went into my cruel period. That's what I call it now."
    "I thought I detected a cruel streak." He gestured at the blowups on the walls.
    She shook her head. "No, not like those. My cruel-period stuff was—well, it's a little hard to explain." She laid down her chopsticks, got up, fetched an oversized book, brought it back to the table, then watched his face as he flipped the pages and looked.
    It was called Celebrities , a book of portraits of film directors, painters, famous writers, other photographers, and she seemed to have caught them