"Yes," I said. "I know."

The room got very quiet. I walked around the desk and took the bottle of Wild Turkey from the top of the file cabinet. I poured a couple of ounces into a rocks glass and put the bottle back. I held the glass without tasting the whiskey. I didn't want the drink so much as I wanted to stretch the moment and let the tension build.

I said, "The inside man had a role to play afterward, too. He had to let Atwood and Cutler know that we got their license number."

Bobby said, "I thought the car was stolen."

"The car was reported stolen. That's how it got on the hot-car sheet. Stolen between five and seven p.m. Monday from an address on Ocean Parkway."

"So?"

"That was the report, and at the time I let it go at that. This afternoon I did what I probably should have done off the bat, and I got the name of the car's owner. It was Rita Donegian."

"Atwood's girlfriend," Skip said.

"Cutler's. Not that it makes a difference."

"I'm confused," Kasabian said. "He stole his girlfriend's car? I don't get it."

"Everyone picks on the Armenians," Keegan said.

I said, "They took her car. Atwood and Cutler took Rita Donegian's car. Afterward they got a call from their accomplice telling them that the plate had been spotted. So they called in then and reported it as having been stolen, and they said it had been taken thus and so many hours earlier, and from an address way out on Ocean Parkway. When I dug a little deeper this afternoon I managed to establish that the report of the theft hadn't been called in until close to midnight.

"I've got things a little out of sequence. The hot-car sheet didn't carry the name of the Mercury's owner as Rita Donegian. It was an Irish name, Flaherty or Farley, I forget, and the address was the one on Ocean Parkway. There was a phone number, but it turned out to be wrong, and I couldn't pick up any listing for the Flaherty or Farley name at that address. So I checked Motor Vehicles, working from the plate number, and the car's owner turned out to be Rita Donegian with an address on Cabrini Boulevard, which is way up in Washington Heights and a long ways from Ocean Parkway or any other part of Brooklyn."

I drank some of the Wild Turkey.

"I called Rita Donegian," I said. "I represented myself as a cop checking the hot-car sheet automatically, making sure what cars have been recovered and what ones are still missing. Oh, yes, she said, they got the car back right away. She didn't think it was really stolen after all; her husband had a few drinks and forgot where he parked it, then found it a couple blocks away after she'd gone and reported it stolen. I said we must have made a clerical error, we had the car listed as stolen in Brooklyn and here she was in upper Manhattan. No, she said, they were visiting her husband's brother in Brooklyn. I said we had an error in the name, too, that it was Flaherty, whatever the hell it was. No, she said, that was no error, that was the brother's name. Then she got a little rattled and explained it was her husband's brother-in-law, actually, that her husband's sister had married a man named Flaherty."

"A poor Armenian girl," Keegan said, "gone to ruination with the Irish. Think of it, Johnny."

Skip said, "Was any of what she said true?"

"I asked her if she was Rita Donegian and if she was the owner of a Mercury Marquis with the license number LJK-914. She said yes to both of those questions. That was the last time she told me the truth. She told a whole string of lies, and she knew she was covering for them or she'd never have been so inventive. She hasn't got a husband. She might refer to Cutler as her husband but she was calling him Mr. Donegian, and the only Mr. Donegian is her father. I didn't want to push too hard because I didn't want her to get the idea that my call was anything beyond simple routine."

Skip said, "Somebody called them after the payoff. To tell them we had the plate number."

"That's right."

"So who knew? The five of us and who else? Keegan, did you get waxed and tell a roomful of people how you were the hero and wrote down the plate number? Is that what happened?"

"I went to confession," Billie said, "and I told Father O'Houlihan."

"I'm serious, goddammit."

"I never did trust the shifty-eyed bastard," Billie said.

Gently, John Kasabian said, "Skip, I don't think anybody told anybody. I think that's what Matt's leading up to. It was one of us, wasn't it, Matt?"

Skip said, "One of us? One of us here?"

"Wasn't it, Matt?"

"That's right," I said. "It was Bobby."

Chapter 23

The silence stretched, with everybody looking at Bobby. Then Skip let out a fierce laugh that caromed wildly around the room.

"Matt, you fuck," he said. "You had me going there. You just about had me buying it."

"It's true, Skip."

"Because I'm an actor, Matt?" Bobby grinned at me. "You figure all actors know each other, the way Billie figured Kasabian would have to know the schoolteacher. For Christ's sake, there's probably more actors in this town than there are Armenians."

"Two much-maligned groups," Keegan intoned. "Actors and Armenians, both of them much given to starving."

"I never heard of these guys," Bobby said. "Atwood and Cutler? Are those their names? I never heard of either of them."

I said, "It won't wash, Bobby. You were in classes with Gary Atwood at the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts. You were in a showcase at the Galinda Theater on Second Avenue last year, and that was one of Lee David Cutler's credits."

"You're talking about that Strindberg thing? Six performances to a roomful of empty seats and not even the director knew what the play was supposed to be about? Oh, that was Cutler, the thin guy who played Berndt? Is that who you mean?"

I didn't say anything.

"The Lee threw me. Everybody called him Dave. I suppose I remember him but-"

"Bobby, you son of a bitch, you're lying! "

He turned, looked at Skip. He said, "Am I, Arthur? Is that what you think?"

"It's what I fucking know. I know you, I know you all my life. I know when you're lying."

"The Human Polygraph." He sighed. "Happens you're right."

"I don't believe it."

"Well, make up your mind, Arthur. You're a hard man to agree with. Either I'm lying or I'm not. Which way do you want it?"

"You robbed me. You stole the books, you sold me down the fucking river. How could you do it? You little fuck, how could you do it?"

Skip was standing up. Bobby was still sitting in his chair, an empty glass in his hand. Keegan and John Kasabian were on either side of Bobby, but they drew a little ways away from him during this exchange, as if to give them room.

I was standing to Skip's right, and I was watching Bobby. He took his time with the question, as if it deserved careful consideration.

"Well, hell," he said finally. "Why would anybody do it? I wanted the money."

"How much did they give you?"

"Not all that much, tell you the truth."

"How much?"

"I wanted, you know, a third. They laughed. I wanted ten, they said five, we wound up at seven grand." He spread his hands. "I'm a lousy negotiator. I'm an actor, I'm not a businessman. What do I know about haggling?"

"You screwed me for seven thousand dollars."

"Listen, I wish it was more. Believe me."

"Don't joke with me, you cocksucker."

"Then don't feed me straight lines, you asshole."

Skip closed his eyes. The sweat was beading up on his forehead, and tendons showed in his neck. His hands knotted into fists, relaxed, knotted up again. He was breathing through his mouth like a fighter between rounds.

He said, "Why'd you need the money?"

"Well, see, my kid sister needs this operation, and-"

"Bobby, don't clown with me. I'll fucking kill you, I swear it."

"Yeah? I needed the money, believe it. I was gonna need the operation. I was gonna get my legs broken."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about I borrowed five thousand dollars and put it into a cocaine deal and it fell in the shit, and I had to pay back the five because I didn't borrow it from Chase Manhattan. I haven't got that good of a friend there. I borrowed it from a guy out in Woodside who told me my legs were all the collateral I'd need."

"What the hell were you doing in a coke deal?"

"Trying to make a dollar for a change. Trying to get out from under."

"You make it sound like the American Dream."

"It was a fucking nightmare. The deal went in the toilet, I still owed the money, I had to come up with a hundred a week just to keep paying the vig. You know how it works. You pay a hundred a week forever and you still owe the five grand, and I can't cover my expenses to begin with, never mind finding another hundred a week. I was running behind, and there's interest on the interest, and the seven grand I got from Cutler and Atwood, it's fucking gone, man. I paid the shy six grand to get him off my back forever, I paid some other debts I owed, I got a couple hundred dollars in my wallet. That's what's left." He shrugged. "Easy come, easy go. Right?"

Skip put a cigarette in his mouth and fumbled with his lighter. He dropped it, and when he reached to pick it up he accidentally kicked it under the desk. Kasabian put a hand on his shoulder to steady him, then lit a match and gave him a light. Billie Keegan got down on the floor and looked around until he found the lighter.

Skip said, "You know what you cost me?"

"I cost you twenty grand. I cost John thirty."

"You cost us each twenty-five. I owe Johnny five, he knows he'll get it."

"Whatever you say."

"You cost us fifty thousand fucking dollars so you could wind up with seven. What am I talking about? You cost us fifty thousand dollars so you could wind up even."

"I said I got no head for business."

"You got no head at all, Bobby. You needed money, you could have sold your friends to Tim Pat Morrissey for ten grand. That's the reward he was offering, that's three thousand more than they gave you."

"I wasn't gonna rat 'em out."

"No, of course not. But you'd sell me'n John down shit creek, wouldn't you?"

Bobby shrugged.

Skip dropped his cigarette on the floor, stepped on it. "You needed money," he said, "why didn't you come and ask me for it? Will you just tell me that? You coulda come to me before you went to the shy. Or the shy's pushing you, you need money to cover, you could've come to me then."

"I didn't want to ask you for the money."

"You didn't want to ask me for it. It's okay to steal it from me, but you didn't want to ask me for it."

Bobby drew back his head. "Yeah, that's right, Arrrr-thur. I didn't want to ask you for it."

"Did I ever refuse you?"

"No."

"Did I ever make you crawl?"

"Yeah."

"When?"

"All the time. Let the actor play bartender for a while. Let's put the actor behind the stick, hope he don't give away the whole store. It's a big joke, my acting. I'm your little windup toy, your fucking pet actor."