Richard the Third looked puzzled. "What is it?" Richard the First asked. "What's the scenario here?" "Scenario?"

"Yes, how did this happen?"

"I see his point," Richard the Second said.

"What point? They were fighting over the bag. They killed each other."

"How can a person stab another person while that person is drowning him?"

"That's not how it happened."

"Then how did it happen?"

Richard the First thought this over for a moment. "They were fighting over the bag," he said again. The other two waited.

"Richard stabbed him, whoever he is."

They still waited.

"Then he got in the tub so he could wash off the blood."

"With his clothes on?"

"He was drunk," Richard the First said. "That's why he got in the tub with all his clothes on. In fact, that's how he drowned. He was trying to wash himself, but he fell in the tub. He was drunk!"

He looked at the other two expectantly. "Sounds good to me," Richard the Second said. "Just might fly," Richard the Third said.

Grinning, Richard the First winked at himself in the mirror over the bathroom sink.

It was snowing when they left the apartment for the bus terminal.

The time was ten minutes past two.

Detective First Grade Oliver Weeks known far and wide, but particularly wide, as Fat Ollie Weeks though never to his face got into the act because two dead bodies were found in an apartment in Eighty-eighth Precinct, which happened to be his bailiwick.

The discovery was made by a woman who lived on Richard Cooper's floor, who happened to be by his door when she saw it standing wide open. She called into him, and then stepped inside and saw a mess there, clothes thrown all over which way, drawers pulled out, and figures somebody's been in there and ripped him off, so she went downstairs to tell the super. This was seventeen minutes past five, about a half hour after Ollie and his team had relieved the day watch.

super went upstairs with her and found the two bodies in the bathroom and ran right down again to dial Nine-One-One. The responding blues radioed precinct with a double DOA and Ollie and an Eight-Eight detective named Wilbur Sloat, who sounded black but who was actually a tall, thin blond man with a scraggly blond mustache, rode over there to Ainsley and North Eleventh. They got there at a quarter to six.

Since Ollie was a bigot in the truest sense of the word that is to say, he hated everyone he was

naturally tickled to death to see two of the precinct's more contemptible black specimens dead by their own hands. For such was what it appeared to be at first glance.

"Make either one of them?" Sloat asked.

He was a new detective, and he affected mannerisms and speech he heard on cop television shows. Ollie would have liked it better if Sloat had stayed back in the squad room answering telephones and picking his nose. Ollie was aloner. He preferred being aloner. That way, you didn't have to deal with assholes all the time.

The one with his throat slit, he recognized at once as a small-time pimp named Jamal "The Jackal" Stone, formerly known as Jackson Stone before he picked himself a name he thought sounded African. Jamal, my ass. Ollie had recently read in Newsweek magazine that forty-four percent of all persons of color in America preferred being called "black," whereas only twenty-eight percent liked to be called African American So why did all these niggers (Ollie's own choice of appellation by a personal margin of one hundred percent) give themselves African names and run around celebrating African holidays and wearing fezzes and robes, what the hell was it?

The way Ollie looked at it, a simple fact of American life was that one out of every three black males was currently enmeshed in the criminal justice system. That meant that thirty-three and athird percent of the black male population was either in jail, on parole, or awaiting trial.

So, yeah, if a white guy crossed the street when he saw three black men approaching him, it was because one of them might be

Johnnie Cochran, sure, and another might be Darden, okay, but the third one might be O Simpson.

So here were two dead black men in a bathroom. Big surprise.

The way Ollie saw it, there were two instituti that should be reinstated all over the world. One of them was dictatorship and the other was slavery. He told Sloat who the one on the floor was. "Got himself juked real good," Sloat said Juked, Ollie thought. Jesus.

The one in the tub he didn't recognize under allthat water, which distorted his good looks. But when the M.E. had him pulled out of the tub so he could examine him, Ollie pegged him at once, as a two-bit drug dealer named Richard Cooper, who once broke both a man's legs for calling him Richie. M.E. wouldn't even speculate that the cause of death was drowning, having been burned on a similar call years ago where it turned out a man had been before someone shoved his head facedown in a toilet bowl. The one on the floor had definitely been slashed, though, so the M.E. had no trouble determining that the cause of death was severance of the carotid artery.

The two Homicide detectives working the night shift were called Flaherty and Flanagan. Ollie told them he knew both of the victims, one of them by his ugly face, the other by his ugly reputation. Sloat suggested that perhaps they'd got into a fight over the handbag there on the floor, one thing leading to another, and so on and so forth, the same old story.

Same old story, Ollie thought. Fuckin dope's been a detective hardly three months, he's talkin about the same old story.

"A clutch," Flaherty said.

"Well, I don't know whether they were grabbing each other or not,"

Sloat said. "I'm only suggesting they may have done each other."

Done each other, Ollie thought.

"The bag, I mean," Flaherty said. "A clutch." "It's called a clutch,"

Flanagan said. "The type of bag," Flaherty said. "A clutch bag."

"A handbag without handles."

"What's that got to do with the price of fish?" Ollie asked impatiently.

"For the sake of accuracy," Flaherty said. "In your report. You should call it a clutch bag."

"A red patent-leather clutch handbag," Flanagan said. Most Homicide Division detectives favored wearing black, the color of mourning, the color of death. But black suited these two more than it did many of their colleagues. Tall and thin, with pale features and slender waxen hands, the two resembled vampires who had wandered in out of the snowy cold, the shoulders of their black coats damp, their eyes a watery blue, their lips bloodless, their shoes a sodden black. They were both wearing white woolen mufflers, a limp sartorial touch.

"How much money is that on the floor?" Flanagan asked.

"Five C-notes," Sloat said.

C-notes, Ollie thought.

"Don't forget the three jumbo vials," Flaherty said. "Hey, you!"

Ollie yelled to one of the technicians. "Okay to look in this bag now?

This clutch bag? This red patent-leather clutch handbag?"

The technician turned off his vacuum cleaner, walked over to where they were standing, and began dusting the bag for latents. The detectives wandered around the apartment, waiting for him to finish.

"No sheets on the bed, you notice that?" Flaherty said.

"What do these people know about sheets?" Ollie said. "You think they have sheets in Africa? In Africa they sleep in huts with mud floors, they have flies in their fuckin eyes day and night, they drink goat's milk with blood in it, what the fuck do they know about sheets?"

"This ain't Africa," Flanagan said.