It was too late to get to the bank. After London left I settled my tab and cashed a marker at the bar. My first stop would be the Eighteenth Precinct, and it’s considered bad manners to show up empty-handed.

I called first to make sure he’d be there, then took a bus east and another one downtown. Armstrong’s is on Ninth Avenue, around the corner from my Fifty-seventh Street hotel. The Eighteenth is housed on the ground floor of the Police Academy, a modern eight-story building with classes for recruits and prep courses for the sergeants’ and lieutenants’ exams. They’ve got a pool there, and a gym equipped with weight machines and a running track. You can take martial arts courses, or deafen yourself practicing on the pistol range.

I felt the way I always do when I walk into a station house. Like an impostor, I suppose, and an unsuccessful one at that. I stopped at the desk, said I had business with Detective Fitzroy. The uniformed sergeant waved me on. He probably assumed I was a member in good standing. I must still look like a cop, or walk like one, or something. People read me that way. Even cops.

I walked on through to the squad room and found Fitzroy typing a report at a corner desk. There were half a dozen Styrofoam coffee cups grouped on the desk, each holding about an inch of light coffee. Fitzroy motioned me to a chair and I sat down while he finished what he was typing. A couple of desks away, two cops were hassling a skinny black kid with eyes like a frog. I gather he’d been picked up for dealing three-card monte. They weren’t giving him all that hard of a time, but then it wasn’t the crime of the century, either.

Fitzroy looked as I remembered him, maybe a little older and a little heavier. I don’t suppose he put in many hours on the running track. He had a beefy Irish face and gray hair cropped close to his skull, and not too many people would have taken him for an accountant or an orchestra conductor or a cabbie. Or a stenographer—he made pretty good time on his typewriter, but he only used two fingers to do it.

He finished finally and pushed the machine to one side. “I swear the whole thing’s paperwork,” he said. “That and court appearances. Who’s got time left to detect anything? Hey, Matt.” We shook hands. “Been a while. You don’t look so bad.”

“Was I supposed to?”

“No, course not. How about some coffee? Milk and sugar?”

“Black is fine.”

He crossed the room to the coffee machine and came back with another pair of Styrofoam cups. The two detectives went on ragging the three-card dealer, telling him they figured he had to be the First Avenue Slasher. The kid kept up his end of the banter reasonably well.

Fitzroy sat down, blew on his coffee, took a sip, made a face. He lit a cigarette and leaned back in his swivel chair. “This London,” he said. “You saw him?”

“Just a little while ago.”

“What did you think? You gonna help him out?”

“I don’t know if that’s the word for it. I told him I’d give it a shot.”

“Yeah, I figured there might be something in it for you, Matt. Here’s a guy looking to spend a few dollars. You know what it’s like, it’s like his daughter up and died all over again and he’s got to think he’s doing something about it. Now there’s nothing he can do, but if he spends a few dollars he’ll maybe feel better, and why shouldn’t it go to a good man who can use it? He’s got a couple bucks, you know. It’s not like you’re taking it from a crippled newsie.”

“That’s what I gathered.”

“So you’ll give it a shot,” he said. “That’s good. He wanted me to recommend somebody to him and right off I thought of you. Why not give the business to a friend, right? People take care of each other and that makes the world go on spinning. Isn’t that what they say?”

I had palmed five twenties while he was getting the coffee. Now I leaned forward and tucked them into his hand. “Well, I can use a couple days work,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

“Listen, a friend’s a friend, right?” He made the money disappear. A friend’s a friend, all right, but a favor’s a favor and there are no free lunches, not in or out of the department. And why should there be? “So you’ll chase around and ask a few questions,” he went on, “and you can string him for as long as he wants to play, and you don’t have to bust your hump over it. Nine years, for Christ’s sake. Wrap this one up and we’ll fly you down to Dallas, let you figure out who killed J.F.K.”

“It must be a pretty cold trail.”

“Colder’n Kelsey’s legendary nuts. If there was any reason at the time to think she wasn’t just one more entry in the Icepick Prowler’s datebook, then maybe somebody would of done a little digging at the time. But you know how those things work.”

“Sure.”

“We got this guy now over here on First Avenue taking whacks at people on the street, swinging at ’em with a butcher knife. We got to figure they’re random attacks, right? You don’t run up to the victim’s husband and ask him was she fucking the mailman. Same with what’s-her-name, Ettinger. Maybe she was fucking the mailman and maybe that’s why she got killed, but there didn’t look to be any reason to check it out at the time and it’s gonna be a neat trick to do it now.”

“Well, I can go through the motions.”

“Sure, why not?” He tapped an accordion-pleated manila file. “I had them pull this for you. Why don’t you do a little light reading for a few minutes? There’s a guy I gotta see.”

HE was gone a little better than half an hour. I spent the time reading my way through the Icepick Prowler file. Early on, the two detectives popped the three-card dealer into a holding cell and rushed out, evidently to run down a tip on the First Avenue Slasher. The Slasher had done his little number right there in the Eighteenth, just a couple of blocks from the station house, and they were evidently pretty anxious to put him away.

I was done with the file when Frank Fitzroy got back. He said, “Well? Get anything?”

“Not a whole lot. I made a few notes. Mostly names and addresses.”

“They may not match up after nine years. People move. Their whole fucking lives change.”

God knows mine did. Nine years ago I was a detective on the NYPD. I lived on Long Island in a house with a lawn and a backyard and a barbecue grill and a wife and two sons. I had moved, all right, though it was sometimes difficult to determine the direction. Surely my life had changed.

I tapped the file folder. “Pinell,” I said. “How sure is it he didn’t kill Barbara Ettinger?”

“Gilt-edged, Matt. Bottled in bond. He was in Bellevue at the time.”

“People have been known to slip in and out.”

“Granted, but he was in a straitjacket. That hampers your movement a little. Besides, there’s things that set the Ettinger killing apart from the others. You only notice them if you look for them, but they’re there.”

“Like what?”

“Number of wounds. Ettinger had the lowest number of wounds of all eight victims. The difference isn’t major but maybe it’s enough to be significant. Plus all the other victims had wounds in the thighs. Ettinger had nothing in the thighs or legs, no punctures. Thing is, there was a certain amount of variation among the other victims. He didn’t stamp out these murders with a cookie cutter. So the discrepancies with Ettinger didn’t stand out at the time. The fewer wounds and the no wounds in the thighs, you can look at it that he was rushed, he heard somebody or thought he heard somebody and he didn’t have time to give her the full treatment.”

“Sure.”

“The thing that made it so obvious that it was the Icepick guy who cooled her, well, you know what that was.”

“The eyes.”

“Right.” He nodded approval. “All of the victims were stabbed through the eyes. One shot through each eyeball. That never made the papers. We held it back the way you always try and hold one or two things back to keep the psychos from fooling you with false confessions. You wouldn’t believe how many clowns already turned themselves in for the slashings down the street.”

“I can imagine.”

“And you have to check ’em all out, and then you have to write up each interrogation, and that’s the real pain in the ass. Anyway, getting back to Ettinger. The Icepick guy always went for the eyes. We kept the wraps on that detail, and Ettinger got it in the eye, so what are you going to figure? Who’s gonna give a shit if she got it in the thighs or not when you’ve got an eyeball puncture to run with?”

“But it was only one eye.”

“Right. Okay, that’s a discrepancy, but it lines up with the fewer punctures and the no wounds in the thighs. He’s in a hurry. No time to do it right. Wouldn’t you figure it that way?”

“Anybody would.”

“Of course. You want some more coffee?”

“No thanks.”

“I guess I’ll pass myself. I’ve had too much already today.”

“How do you figure it now, Frank?”

“Ettinger? What do I figure happened?”

“Uh-huh.”

He scratched his head. Vertical frown lines creased his forehead on either side of his nose. “I don’t think it was anything complicated,” he said. “I think somebody read the papers and watched television and got turned on by the stories about the Icepick guy. You get these imitators every now and then. They’re psychos without the imagination to think up their own numbers so they hitch a ride on somebody else’s craziness. Some loony watched the six o’clock news and went out and bought an icepick.”

“And happened to get her in the eye by chance?”

“Possible. Could be. Or it could be it just struck him as a good idea, same as it did Pinell. Or something leaked.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“Far as I can remember, there was nothing in the papers or on the news. Nothing about the eye wounds, I mean. But maybe there was and then we squelched it but not before this psycho read it or heard it and it made an impression. Or maybe it never got into the media but the word was around. You got a few hundred cops who know something, plus everybody who’s around for the postmortems, plus everybody who sees the records, all the clerks and all, and each of them tells three people and those people all talk, and how long does it take before a lot of people know about it?”

“I see what you mean.”

“If anything, the business with the eyes makes it look like it was just a psycho. A guy who tried it once for a thrill and then let it go.”

“How do you figure that, Frank?”

He leaned back, interlaced his fingers behind his head. “Well, say it’s the husband,” he said. “Say he wants to kill her because she’s fucking the mailman, and he wants to make it look like the Icepick Prowler so he won’t carry the can for it himself. If he knows about the eyes, he’s gonna do both of them, right? He’s not taking any chances. A nut, he’s something else again. He does one eye because it’s something to do, and then maybe he’s bored with it so he doesn’t do the other one. Who knows what goes through their fucking heads?”

“If it’s a psycho, then there’s no way to tag him.”

“Of course there isn’t. Nine years later and you’re looking for a killer without a motive? That’s a needle in a haystack when the needle’s not even there. But that’s all right. You take this and play with it, and after you’ve run the string you just tell London it must have been a psycho. Believe me, he’ll be happy to hear it.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what he thought nine years ago, and he got used to the idea. He accepted it. Now he’s afraid it’s somebody he knows and that’s driving him crazy, so you’ll investigate it all for him and tell him everything’s okay, the sun still comes up in the east every morning and his daughter was still killed by a fucking Act of God. He can relax again and go back to his life. He’ll get his money’s worth.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Course I’m right. You could even save yourself running around and just sit on your ass for a week and then tell him what you’ll wind up telling him anyway. But I don’t suppose you’ll do that, will you?”

“No, I’ll give it my best shot.”

“I figured you’d at least go through the motions. What it is, you’re still a cop, aren’t you, Matt?”

“I suppose so. In a way. Whatever that means.”

“You don’t have anything steady, huh? You just catch a piece of work like this when it comes along?”

“Right.”

“You ever think about coming back?”

“To the department? Not very often. And never very seriously.”

He hesitated. There were questions he wanted to ask, things he wanted to say to me, but he decided to leave them unsaid. I was grateful for that. He got to his feet and so did I. I thanked him for the time and the information and he said an old friend was an old friend and it was a pleasure to be able to help a pal out. Neither of us mentioned the hundred dollars that had changed hands. Why should we? He’d been glad to get it and I was glad to give it. A favor’s no good unless you pay for it. One way or the other, you always do.