When they were out of the room with the door closed he said, “I was here last night.”

“I’m not surprised. You’re home all the time, from what you’ve told me. Home Alone is a movie, not an alibi. I don’t suppose you had company?”

“No,” he said, “but I think I can prove I was here. The window is ten to midnight, isn’t that what they said?”

“Ten to midnight.”

“I had a couple of deliveries somewhere around that time. Must have been close to ten when I called and had Two Boots send up a pizza. And I called the deli a little after that and ordered up a sandwich and a six-pack of Beck’s.”

“You had a pizza and a sandwich at the same time?”

“I was out of beer and I wanted one with the pizza. I don’t like to call the deli just for beer.”

“What, they’ll think you’re a drunk?”

“You’re right, it’s stupid, but I was just as happy a couple of hours ago when I had the sandwich for lunch. They should both have records of the delivery.”

“They should.”

“While I was eating the pizza,” he said, “my agent called. She’s working on a deal, she wanted to discuss strategy. She can confirm that we were on the phone for ten minutes, maybe closer to fifteen.”

“And this was when?”

“Say ten-thirty.”

“That leaves plenty of time for you to get in a cab and kill three women in a whorehouse. If I’m going to show anything to Frick and Frack, I’d like to show ’em enough to cover you past midnight.”

“I was online,” he said.

“What, the computer? They can take those things apart and find out what you had for breakfast, but—”

“No,” he said, “I was online, Maury. This was after I got off the phone with Roz.”

“Your agent.”

“Right. Something she said, it doesn’t matter, but I wanted to check something on Amazon. I logged on, I checked my e-mail, and I went to their website.”

“How can we prove this?”

“I have a dedicated phone line for the computer. It’s a local call to AOL when you log on. Won’t there be a record?”

“Very good.”

“And I wound up buying a couple of books from Amazon. I always do, it’s impossible to visit the site without remembering some book you think you have to have, especially in the middle of the night. A couple of clicks and it’s in the mail two days later.”

“They’d have a record of a purchase.”

“They send you an e-mail confirming it, with time and date on it. I downloaded that, it’s on my hard drive.” Winters went over and opened the door.

“Y O U ’ L L C O N F I R M A L L T H I S , ” the lawyer told the two detectives,

“in about a minute and a half, give or take. You’ll pull the LUDS

and that should be enough, but you can go as far as you want. Put one of your computer people on it, talk to the pizza place, the deli.”

“We had to check him out,” Arthur Pender said.

“And you checked, and he’s out. But as far as I’m concerned, you boys are on to something.”

They looked at him.

“Fairchild and the three last night,” Winters said. “They’re as linked as they ever were. The same boy finds all the bodies, that was too good a coincidence twenty minutes ago and it’s no different now.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning Ernest Hemingway here didn’t do either of them. You just cleared him on one, you should go ahead and clear him on the other.”

“Not our case,” Hurley said.

“So why not talk to your friends at the Sixth, tell them talk to the geniuses in the DA’s office.”

“Yeah, right. I’m sure they’d love to hear from us.”

“How could you not tell them? You just looked at this gentleman in connection with a homicide and cleared him a hundred percent. You don’t think that’s information they ought to have?”

“I suppose we could make a call.”

“Of course you could,” Winters said. “Thanks for coming, fellows. You’ve been very helpful.”

W I N T E R S S T A Y E D A N D C H A T T E D with him after the two detectives had left. After the lawyer’s departure, Creighton called his agent.

“Talk about highs and lows,” he said. “I started out thinking I was going to be charged with three murders. Next minute Maury’s talking about getting the original charges dropped.”

“Really?”

“But he told me privately that’s not going to happen. The DA’s not going to withdraw an indictment just because I’ve been cleared in a case that may or may not be related to the original crime I’m charged with. They’ve still got the same evidence they had before. She still picked me up at the Kettle and I still went home with her.”

“And she’s still dead.”

“The poor woman. You know, I’ve been angry at her all along, for getting me into this mess in the first place. Like it’s her fault.

But all she wanted was to get laid, and she wound up dead, and how is any of that her fault?”

“You’re not angry with her anymore.”

“No, and I can’t understand why I was in the first place.”

“You were afraid, sweetie.”

“And now I’m not, because I’m beginning to see daylight. This won’t get charges dropped, according to Maury, but what it should do is create a little doubt in the minds of Reade and Slaughter.”

“The arresting officers?”

“Right. Even if they’re still completely convinced I did it, they’ll want to cover their asses in case it becomes clear I didn’t. Which means they might look a little harder for witnesses who might steer them in the direction of another suspect.”

“That would be wonderful. The only thing . . .”

“What?”

“This is going to sound like St. Augustine. ‘Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.’ ”

“You lost me.”

“Look, you and I both know you didn’t do this thing, right? And we know you’re going to be cleared.”

“It’s beginning to look that way.”

“Well, that’s the important thing, in fact it’s the only thing that matters, but all things being equal . . .”

“What?”

“I’d just as soon it doesn’t all clear up today or tomorrow,” she said. “Or even next week or next month. God, that sounds terrible, doesn’t it?”

“It might, except I think I see where you’re going.”

“The best thing for our purposes is if you’re an accused murderer awaiting trial when we make the deal. Then, when the book comes out, you’re a guy who was falsely accused of a horrible crime and has since been completely exonerated. I know you’d like to be off the hook as soon as possible, but I’m your agent and I used to be your publisher and I can’t help seeing it from that standpoint.”

“Don’t apologize. I’m writing all the time these days, Roz. I’m completely into the book, and of course I want it to do everything it can. If I’m cooped up in my apartment for the time being, well, it’s worth it. And I’d be cooped up anyway, putting words on the screen.”

“And it’s going well?”

“It’s going beautifully.”

“I turned down a couple of preempts, sweetie. One yesterday and one this morning.”

“What were the numbers?”

“I’m not going to tell you. I’m auctioning on Friday. I told Esther at Crown what I want for a floor bid. That’ll give them topping privileges. She’s supposed to get back to me later this afternoon.”

“What do you want for a floor?”

“I’m not going to tell you that, either, until I find out if I get it.

Oh, that reminds me, I was going to call you about this. Esther had a suggestion, and whether or not we wind up going with them, I think it’s worth thinking about. How would you feel about a name change?”

“You mean a pseudonym?”

“Jesus Christ, no! We’ve got all this publicity, why would we want to shitcan it?”

“That’s what I thought, but—”

“You’ve always used Blair Creighton, but all the news stories have referred to you as John Creighton, so Esther suggested bylin-ing the books, all of them, old and new, as by John Blair Creighton.

Which I think has a very nice ring to it.”

“I should have done it that way from the beginning,” he said.

“I’ve had the thought off and on for years.”

“So that’s a yes?”

“An emphatic yes.”

“Jeez, that was easy. Every client I have should be like you, baby.”

“Under indictment, you mean?”

“Get back to work,” she said.

H E T H O U G H T H E ’ D H A V E trouble getting back into the book, but he looked at the last sentence he’d written and remembered what he’d planned to write next, and once he’d put the words down there were more words to follow them.

He was on a break, cracking a fresh pack of cigarettes, when she called again to report Esther Blinkoff at Crown had come up with the floor bid. In return, she got to make a final offer when all the other participants had finished bidding.

“US and Canada only,” she said, “because my guess is we’ll get the same dollars with or without foreign, so why not keep them for ourselves? Everybody’s going to think the book won’t do much overseas, because who gives a shit in Frankfurt if some woman gets strangled in New York? What they’ll forget is you’re a novelist with a following overseas, and we’re not selling true crime, we’re selling literature. They might not get much abroad, but I will.”

“What’s the floor?”

“I was coming to that. One point one.”

“Million.”

“Duh.”

“Jesus. Well, I guess my personal Philip Marlowe can order doubles if he wants. It sounds like I’m going to be able to afford to cover his tab. One million one hundred thousand. Where’d the point one come from?”

“It’s coming from Crown, but it was my idea and I was ready to fight for it. An even million sounds preemptive, even if everybody jumps up and down and calls it a floor. The extra hundred thousand makes the whole number sound like a step in the right direction.”

The extra hundred thousand was substantially higher all by itself than his highest previous advance.

“Plus,” she said, “if all the other players keep their hands in their pockets, we’ve got a hundred thousand more than we’d have otherwise.”

“There’s that.”

“You know what’s a shame? The world never knew you were a suspect in the whorehouse murders, and now they don’t get to learn you’ve been cleared.”

“It’ll probably come out. Everything seems to, sooner or later.”