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underscored the play’s most haunting moment: Stan Getz’s recording of “Her.” Once they were no longer together, she had gone in search of the album and found it at King Karol on Forty-second Street. She had bought the album, Focus, and had nearly worn it out in the years since, playing it again and again.
    She lay quietly in bed, chewing her thumb, her face wet with tears. She really had no idea what she was crying about.
    Nothing ever quite being all it was supposed to be?
    Maybe.
    Sir snuggled up in the curve of her leg, tail wagging slowly.
    Finally they slept.

Chapter Five
    A COUPLE OF DAYS later, the man with the gun already fading in her memory, overtaken by the rush of events at the office, Natalie was slouched behind her desk, her feet cocked up on a lower drawer, shoes off, reading a letter from an angry, disappointed author. It was almost two o’clock, still well within the limits of publishers’ lunches and the only stretch of the day when she wasn’t on the telephone. In a recent attempt to reclaim time for thought, and to read a bit more, she had ruthlessly curtailed her lunch and cocktail calendar: in the past there had been a business lunch every day, drinks or dinner on business four nights a week. Jay said he didn’t believe she could cut it back, said that it would dramatically lessen her effectiveness. She suspected he might be right, but she’d been working too hard, she had to give it a try. And so far, so good. Today she was lunching at her desk. And tonight’s dinner with Lotte was only partially business, she hoped.
    She was trying to deal with an immensely sticky doughnut and a cup of now-cold coffee, trying to dream up a soothing response for the unhappy writer, when the door to her office opened and Jay loomed, filling the space. She looked up in surprise at his failure to knock and saw that he was waving a folded copy of the New York Post at her. As Wodehouse once said, though he may not have looked exactly disgruntled, he was surely far from gruntled. The normal tightness of his expression tended to sag into jowls when he wasn’t happy: she recognized the sag of concern.
    “You look like you’re posing for a statue, Jay,” she said lightly. “Would you like to come in? Or do you just want to wave the day’s news at me?”
    “Very funny,” he growled, entering and laying the paper on her desk. He was just back from the Four Seasons and she couldn’t bear to tell him there was a little spot of something on his blue-and-white-striped shirt. “Your fame spreads, Nat. But if I may offer an opinion, it sounds a little scary to me. …”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Look at Teddy Garfein’s column, my dear.” He stood over her, frowning, staring down at her, making her slightly crazy. There was that fine patina of criticism in his voice and it pissed her off, frankly.
    But that was forgotten when she saw Garfein’s tidbit.
This week’s hot, glamour-girl literary, deal-maven, Natalie Rader at the Danmeier Agency, had one of those spooky midtown glimpses of the underbelly of life that makes this truly a Wormy Big Apple. Sometimes, anyway. Working late—as deal-mavens always do—our Natalie witnessed what we can only assume is the postscript to a—dare we say it?—murder. Say, how’s that for a title, Nat? Would it play in Peoria? Anyhoo, she saw a gunsel de-gun himself on a Madison Ave. streetcorner, pitch his weaponry over a fence and into a building site! And naturally nobody noticed … but eagle-eyed Natalie. So what’s the upshot? Is there a pistol-packin’ construction foreman now on the loose? Who got blasted in the hours before the gunsel threw his gun away? And can Natalie find someone to turn her glimpse of murders aftermath into a hot property? Ira Levin, where are you when Nat needs you?
    “I don’t believe it,” she said. “How in the name of God—”
    “You mean it didn’t happen?”
    “No, it happened. It was the night we had the party