Maybe that was what led me to leave Nedrick Bayliss's widow undisturbed. A series of telephone calls to Atlanta, where he'd died in a room at the downtown Marriott of a single gunshot wound to the head, left me feeling I knew as much as I had to know about him and his death. He'd been a stock analyst, employed by a Wall Street firm, commuting to work from a home in Hastingson-Hudson. His area of specialization was the textiles industry, and he'd gone to Atlanta to meet with officers of a company he was interested in.

Again, no note, and no indication how he'd come by the unregistered revolver found at his side. "I don't know how it is up there," an Atlanta police officer told me, "but it's not the hardest thing in the world to find somebody who'll sell you a gun in this town." I told him it wasn't that hard in New York, either.

Instead of a note there was a sheet of hotel stationery in the middle of the desk, with a pen uncapped next to it, as if he'd tried to write something and couldn't think of the right way to say it. Having given up on it, he called the desk instead and told the clerk they'd better send a bellman to room 1102. "I'm about to take my life," he announced, and hung up the phone.

The clerk wasn't sure whether he was in the middle of a tragedy or a practical joke. He rang Bayliss's room and no one answered the phone. He was trying to think what to do when someone else called to report a gunshot.

It certainly looked like a suicide. Bayliss was slumped in a chair, a bullet in the temple, the gun on the floor right where you'd expect to find it. Nothing to suggest he hadn't been alone when he did it. He hadn't locked his door with the chain, but he'd have wanted to make it easy for them to get in. He was considerate, after all; he'd proved that when he called the desk to let them know what he was about to do.

How hard would it have been to stage it?

You get Ned Bayliss to let you into his room. Finding a pretext shouldn't be any harder than finding an unregistered gun. Then, when he's sitting down, say, looking at some papers you've handed him, and you're crouching next to him to point out something, you reach into your jacket pocket and come out with the gun and before he knows what's happening you've got the muzzle to his temple and you're giving the trigger a squeeze.

Then you wipe your prints from the gun, press it into his hand, and let it drop to the carpet. You arrange the hotel letterhead and the pen on the desk, pick up the phone, and announce your impending death. Back in your own room, you make another call to report a gunshot.

Easy enough.

A paraffin test would very likely suggest that the dead man had not fired a gun recently, but how much lab work would the police allot to an open-and-shut suicide? The officer I talked to couldn't find any record of a test, but said that didn't prove anything. After all, he said, it all happened eighteen years ago, so it was a wonder that he'd been able to lay his hands on the file.

I could have called his widow.

I took the trouble to trace her, which wasn't difficult, given that she hadn't been trying to disappear. She had remarried, divorced, and been married a third time, and now she was living in Niles, Michigan, and I suppose I could have called her and asked her if her first husband, Ned Bayliss, had been despondent before his fateful trip to Atlanta. Was he drinking a lot, ma'am? Did he have any kind of a drug history?

I decided to let her be.

I'd called Atlanta from my room in the Northwestern, and when I hung up the phone for the day something kept me right there in the little room. I pulled a chair over to the window and looked out at the city.

I don't know how long I sat there. I started off thinking about the case I was working on, the club of thirty-one. I thought how their ranks had thinned over the past three decades, and before I knew it I was thinking of my own life over the same span of years, and the awful toll those years had taken. I thought of the people I'd lost, some to death, some because our lives had slipped off in different directions. My ex-wife, Anita, long since remarried. The last time I'd spoken to her was to offer condolences for her mother's death. The last time I'd seen her- I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen her.

My sons, Michael and Andrew, both of them grown, both of them strangers to me. Michael was living in northern California, a sales rep for a company that supplied components to manufacturers of computers. In the four years since he graduated from college I'd spoken to him ten times at the outside. Two years ago he got married to a girl named June, and he'd sent me their wedding picture. She is Chinese, very short and slender, her expression in the photograph utterly serious. Mike started putting on weight in college, and now he looks like a bluff, hearty salesman, fat and jolly, posed incongruously next to this inscrutable daughter of the Orient.

"We'll have to get together," he says when we speak on the phone. "Next time I get to New York I'll let you know. We'll have dinner, maybe catch a Knicks game."

"Maybe I could get out to the Coast," I suggested the last time I talked to him. There was just the slightest pause, and then he was quick to assure me that would be great, really great, but right now wasn't a good time. A very busy time at work these days, and he was traveling a lot, and-

He and June live in a condominium near San Jose. I have spoken to her on the phone, this daughter-in-law whom I have never met. Soon I suppose they'll start a family, and then I'll have grandchildren I've never met.

And Andy? The last time I heard from him he was in Seattle, and talking about heading on up to Vancouver. It sounded as though he was calling from a bar, and his voice was thickened with drink. He doesn't call often, and when he does it's always from someplace new, and he always sounds as though he's been drinking. "I'm having fun," he told me. "One of these days I guess I'll settle down, but in the meantime I'm gathering no moss."

Fifty-five years old, and what moss had I gathered? What had I done with those years? And what had they done to me?

And how many did I have left? And, when they'd slipped away like the rest, what would I have to show for them? What did anybody ever have to show for the years that were gone?

There's a liquor store right across the street. From where I sat I could see the customers enter and leave. As I watched them, it came to me that I could look up the store's number in the phone book and have them send up a bottle.

That was as far as I allowed the thought to go. Sometimes I'll let myself consider what type of liquor I'd order, and what brand. This time I shook the thought off early on and breathed deeply several times, willing myself to let it go.

Then I reached for the phone and dialed a number I didn't have to look up.

It rang twice, three times. I had my finger poised to break the connection, not wanting to talk to a machine, but then she picked up.

"This is Matt," I said.

She said, "That's funny. I was just this minute thinking of you."

"And I of you. Would you like company?"

"Would I?" She took a moment to consider the question. "Yes," she said. "Yes, I would."

8

When I first moved to my hotel, Jimmy Armstrong had a saloon right around the corner on Ninth Avenue, and that was where I spent most of my waking hours. After I got sober Jimmy lost his lease and reopened a long block west, at the corner of Tenth and Fifty-seventh. In AA they tell you to avoid the people and places and things that might make you want to drink, and for several years I stayed away from Jimmy's joint. These days I get there now and then. Elaine likes the place on Sunday afternoons, when they have chamber music, and it's always been a good choice for a late supper.

I walked west on Fifty-seventh, but instead of paying a call on Jimmy I went to the high-rise apartment building diagonally across the street. The doorman had been told I was coming; when I gave him my name he said I was expected and pointed to the elevator. I rode up to the twenty-eighth floor and her door opened even as I knocked on it.

"I really was," she said. "Thinking of you just before you called. You look tired. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

"It's probably the humidity. This is going to be some summer if it's like this in June. I just put the air on. This place cools off pretty quickly."

"How are you, Lisa?"

She turned aside. "I'm all right," she said. "Do you want some coffee? Or would you rather have something cold? There's Pepsi, there's iced tea…"

"No, thanks."

She spun around to face me. She said, "I'm glad you're here, but I don't think I want to do anything. Is that all right?"

"Of course."

"We could sit and talk."

"Whatever you say."

She walked to the window. Her apartment faces west, and there are no tall buildings to block her view. I moved up behind her and watched a couple of sailboats on the Hudson.

She was wearing perfume, the musky scent she always wore.

She said, "Oh, who am I kidding?"

She turned to face me once again. I circled her waist and linked my hands, and she leaned back and looked up at me. Her forehead was shining and there were beads of sweat on her upper lip. "Oh!" she said, as if something had startled her, and I drew her close and kissed her, and at first she trembled in my arms and then she threw her own arms around me and we clung together. I felt her body against me, I felt her breasts, I felt the heat of her loins.

I kissed her mouth. I kissed her throat and breathed in her scent.

"Oh!" she cried.

We went to the bedroom and got our clothes off, interrupting the process to kiss, to clutch each other. We fell together onto the bed. "Oh," she said. "Oh, oh, oh…"

Her name was Lisa Holtzmann, and it would not be inaccurate to describe her as young enough to be my daughter, although she had in fact been born almost ten years before my elder son. When I first met her she'd been married to a lawyer named Glenn Holtzmann, and pregnant with his child. She lost the baby early in the third trimester, and not long after that she'd lost her husband; he'd been shot to death while using a pay phone just a couple of blocks away on Eleventh Avenue.

I'd wound up with two clients, one of them the dead man's widow, the other the brother of the man accused of shooting him. I don't know that I did either of them a world of good. The alleged killer, one of the neighborhood street crazies, wound up getting stabbed to death on Rikers Island by someone no saner than himself. The widow Holtzmann wound up in bed with me.

That it happened does not strike me as extraordinary. Traditionally, widows have been regarded as vulnerable to seduction, and as more than ordinarily seductive themselves. My role in Lisa's personal drama, the knight in tarnished armor riding to her rescue, did nothing to hinder our falling into bed together. While I was deeply in love with and committed to Elaine, and by no means uncomfortable with that commitment, there is something in the male chromosomal makeup that renders a new woman alluring simply because she is new.

There had been no other women for me since Elaine and I had found each other again, but I suppose it was inevitable that there would be someone sooner or later. The surprise was that the affair wouldn't quit. It was like the Energizer rabbit. It kept going and going and going…

You didn't need a doctorate in psychology to figure out what was going on. I was obviously a father figure to her, and only the least bit more available than the genuine article. For several years back home in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, he had come to her bed at night. He had thrilled her with his fingers and his mouth, teaching her to gasp out her pleasure like a lady, softly, so the sounds would not carry beyond her bedroom door. He taught her, too, to please him, and by the time she went off to college she had become skilled beyond her years.