"How'd she get all the way down there?"

Jamal looked at him.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Cause I seen her up here not long before," Curly Joe said.

"What do you mean?" Jamal asked again.

"Musta been six or so in the morning. I was in the diner havin a coffee. She got out of a taxi."

Jamal waited.

"You know Richie Cooper?"

"I know him," Jamal said.

"She went off with him and three young kids who were pissing in the gutter.

I seen them from the diner."

He had finally passed out, and they were dragging him into the bathroom where they had filled the tub with water. Not passed out entirely cold, but so sklonked he couldn't walk or even stand, didn't know what the hell was happening to him, just kept waving one arm in the air like a symphony conductor except that he was singing "I Want to Hold Your Hand" as they dragged him across the floor by the ankles. Something fell out of his pocket, the switchblade knife he'd threatened them with earlier tonight. Richard the First stooped to pick it up, jammed it in the pocket of his own jacket. He was sweating heavily. They were about to kill someone, but this had to be done. The girl had been an accident, but this was murder, but it had to be done.

They all knew that. The three Richards now as one.

They were

Richard acting in concert, dragging yet another Richard into the bathroom where the tub full of water waited.

The water looked brownish, this city. Richard the Third was the strongest of them, he grabbed black Richard under the arms, while the two each grabbed a leg. "One... two . . three," they said, and they hoisted him off the floor and swung him into the tub.

"Hey!" he yelled.

Too late.

Jamal knew Richard as a dope dealer pulled down what, five, six bills a day, maybe a thou when business was good and the cotton was high. Used to be in trade together many a moon back, before Jamal tipped to the fact that dealing was a hazardous occupation whereas living off the sweat and toil of the female persuasion was less strenuous and nowhere near as dangerous.

What puzzled Jamal now was what Yolande had been doing with Richard and three white dudes at six this morning, directly after she'd phoned to say she was on the way home. Had Richard decided to do a little freelance pimping on his own? In which case he had to be taught about territorial imperative and not stepping on a fellow entrepreneur's toes. Or had Yolande and Richard decided to share an early morning breakfast with the three honkies? In which case, what had happened to the red patent-leather handbag containing--by Yolande's own admission on the phone." close to two thousand dollars?

Teaching Richard a lesson was no longer necessary now that Yolande was dead.

Recovering that handbag with the money in it was of prime importance, however, and it was the memory of that bag and anticipation of what was in that bag that propelled Jamal up the steps two at a time to Richard's third-floor apartment.

The time was three minutes to noon.

He started fighting the minute they threw him in the tub. He didn't know how to swim and the first thing that entered his mind was that he had somehow fallen into a swimming pool and was going to drown.

Only the second half of this supposition was true.

Jamal was thinking if Richard didn't hand that bag over the minute he asked for it, he was going to beat him senseless.

No cyanosis.

No bruises on the galea of the scalp.

No punctate hemorrhages in the conjunctivae.

And now no dark red fluid blood in the heart, or excess serous fluid in the lungs.

Ergo, no suffocation.

Considering the way she had bled, Blaney wondered if the girl had died from a botched abortion.

If the Pro-Lifers--a hypocritical designation if ever he'd heard one, and don't send me letters, he thought ........ had scared her away from seeking help at any of the city's legal clinics, perhaps she'd found a back-alley butcher to do the job or, worse yet, maybe

she'd tried to do it herself. Too many women attempted tearing the fetal membrane release the amniotic fluid, thereby causing contractions and expulsion of the fetus. Then whatever long thin object they could find, not just a coat hanger depicted in the Pro-Choice propaganda and don't you write to me, either, he thought but also umbrella ribs and knitting needles.

Blaney was a doctor.

He felt the best and only place to perform a gynecological procedure was in a hospital.

Period.

By a trained physician.

Period.

But here in the silence of the morgue, there were moral or religious judgments to be made, no agendas to be met.

There was only search and discovery. How had the girl died? Period.

Blaney found no fetus, nor any fetal parts, in the girl's genital tract or peritoneal cavity. Moreover, he had measured the thickness, length and width of the uterus, the density of the uterine wall, the length of the uterine cavity, the circumference of both the internal and external vaginal openings, and the length of the lower part of the uterus, he found no indication that the girl had been pregnant before her death.

Nor was there any indication that the vaginal vault had been accidentally punctured while she'd been seeking to abort herself, unsurprising in that there had been nothing to abort.

What he found instead was a massive assault on the uterus by a sharp instrument with a saw-toothed edge. The instrument had passed through the cervix, wreaking havoc in its relentless wake, and had ripped through the abdominal cavity where it caused hugely significant damage; Blaney found eighteen inches of the small intestine severed and hanging in the uterus. The pain would have been excruciating. Hemorrhaging would have been profuse. The girl could have died within minutes.

Which might have been a blessing, he guessed.

Only one of the three Richards knew he had just for the fun of it inserted a bread knife with a serrated blade into the girl's vagina.

The other two didn't know such a thing had happened although later they saw a lot of blood running down the inside of her legs and figured it was the black guy with his big shlong had hurt her somehow. Even the one who'd experimented with the knife didn't realize this was what had killed her. He figured the bag over her head had done it, the girl's stupidity in not informing them that the game had gone too far. She should have told them. No one had wanted her dead. Every one of them wanted black Richard dead. Black Richard was their link to the dead girl, who had died by accident, after all, and for whom they most certainly were not about to ruin their lives, all three of them accepted at Harvard?. Hey.

So as Richard thrashed around in the tub, trying to keep his head above water, the three other Richards kept forcing him back under again, time after time, avoiding his pummeling fists, trying not to get

themselves all wet, trying just to for Christ's sake drown him.

They were succeeding in doing just that, finally succumbing to their overpowering insistence subsiding below the surface of the water, unclenching at last, a final thin bubble of air his mouth and rising, rising, when a voice behind them yelled, "The fuck you doin?"

They were each and separately, all three Richards overwhelmed by a powerful feeling of deja vu all again, a black man standing there with outraged surprise on his face, only this time Richard the First had a knife, and he snapped the blade open at once because the last thing on earth they needed was another asshole linking them to a murder.

Jamal remembered too late what his sacred mother taught him about the streets of this here city, it was Mind your own business, son, an stay out of harms way. But this wasn't a city street, this was the bathroom of a onetime business associate sometime friend, and he was being drowned in his own bathtub by three fuckin college boys, or whatever they were, and one of them had a knife in his fist and he was coming at Jamal with a tiny little smile on his face. It was then that Jamal knew this was serious. Man with a big mother knife in his hand and a smile on his face was dangerous. But, of course, all of this was too late, the memory of his mother's admonition, the memory of smiles he had seen on the faces of other would-be assassins, of whom there were far too many in this part of the city in this part of the world.