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“And you figure you’ll take a little walk down them.”

“Well, I took the man’s money,” I said. “I have to do something.”

The Donnell branch library is on Fifty-third off Fifth. I spent a couple of hours in the second-floor reading room going through all the local papers for the past ten days. Once I got past the hard news, most of which was already familiar to me, the bulk of the stories turned out to be non-stories, pieces about homelessness, about neighborhood gentrification, about crime in the streets. There were interviews with people who’d lived for years in the area’s tenements and apartment houses, with others who’d recently moved into Holtzmann’s high-rise, and with a few who lived on the street. Every columnist with an ax to grind found a way to hone it here. Some of it made interesting reading, but it didn’t tell me much I hadn’t already known.

There was one essay I particularly liked, a Times Op-Ed piece by an advertising copywriter who was identified as residing within two blocks of the Holtzmann apartment building. He had been unemployed since late May, and he explained how his economic circumstances altered his perspective.

“With every passing day,” he wrote, “I identify a little less strongly with Glenn Holtzmann, a little more closely with George Sadecki. When the news first broke, I was shocked and horrified. That could have been me on the sidewalk, I told myself. A man just past entering the prime of life, a professional man with a bright future, living in Clinton, the most exciting area of the most stimulating city in the world.

“And as the hours and days slip by,” he went on, “it is a subtly different mirror in which I see myself. That could be me on Rikers Island, I find myself thinking. A man on the verge of middle age, an unemployed idler in a dwindling job market, drifting through the days in Hell’s Kitchen, the most unsettling area in the most desperate city on God’s earth. I still ache for the man who was killed, but I ache too for the man who killed him. I could have found myself in either man’s shoes, in Glenn Holtzmann’s well-polished wing tips or in George Sadecki’s thrift-shop sneakers.”

I walked back to my hotel, pausing along the way for a hot dog and a papaya drink. I checked at the desk for messages but nobody had called. I picked up a container of coffee at the deli next door and carried it across the street to the little park adjacent to the Parc Vendôme. I found a place to sit and took the lid off my coffee, but it was too hot to drink. I set it down alongside me on the bench and got out my notebook.

I jotted things down, thinking on paper, beginning with the assumption that George Sadecki was innocent. Trying to prove it was a waste of time; what I had to do was find someone else who could have done it. Someone with a reason to kill Glenn Holtzmann, or someone who might have done so with no more reason than George had.

Glenn Holtzmann. From where I sat I could see the top floors of his apartment building. If I turned around I could see the table at the Morning Star where we’d had our last conversation. Lisa had lost the baby, he’d told me. I had felt for him that afternoon, but still had remained disinclined to get close to him. I’d felt distanced from him, and was happy to keep him at a distance. I hadn’t wanted to get to know him.

Now it looked as though I had to. A homicide investigation, I’d reminded Joe, properly starts with the victim. To find a killer you look for someone with a reason to kill. To learn the reason you first learn who the victim is.

If someone had a reason.

But maybe he had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He could have been the victim of a failed robbery attempt. Joe had made it sound unlikely, ridiculing the notion of a holdup man who would take the time for a coup de grâce, then dash off without retrieving the money. What he’d said made sense, but that’s more than most criminals do. They’re disorganized. They act impulsively, operate irrationally, and change course abruptly. A relative handful are stable and well organized, but the great majority do something stupid every time they leave the house.

Not that a would-be mugger was the only sort of person who might have killed Holtzmann for no good reason. He could simply have spoken out of turn in a city where altogether too many people walk about armed. Any kind of argument — over the use of a public telephone, for example — had the potential to turn violent.

Or he could have been killed by mistake. That had happened a few years back at a restaurant in Murray Hill. Four men, three of them furriers and the fourth their accountant, had just taken a table and ordered a round of drinks. Two men came in the door and one took out an automatic weapon and sprayed the furriers’ table, killing the four men and wounding a woman at the table next to theirs.

It was a very obvious mob hit, and for a week or two investigators probed for mob infiltration of the fur industry, or evidence linking any of the dead men with one of the five crime families. As it turned out, none of them had ever come any closer to organized crime than buying a candy bar from a vending machine. The intended target had been four other men, principals in a mobbed-up construction firm in Jersey City, who had been sitting on the other side of the restaurant when the hit occurred. The shooter, it turned out, was dyslexic, and had turned left when he should have turned right. (A DEADLY MISKATE was the Post’s headline.)

Well, these things happen. Everybody makes miskates.

So there were two ways to approach it. I could look to the victim or at the event itself. I was about ready to flip a coin when I saw a familiar face no more than twenty yards away. Hair like white Brillo, high cheekbones, a narrow nose, hornrimmed glasses, skin the color of my coffee. It was Barry, George Sadecki’s friend, and he was sitting on an upturned milk crate, with a three-foot concrete cube serving him for a table. He had a chessboard set up on it and he was smoking a cigarette and studying the pieces on the board.

I walked over and greeted him by name and he looked up at me, his mouth smiling easily even as his eyes labored to place me. “I know you,” he said. “Your name’ll come to me.”

“It’s Matt,” I said.

“See? Came to me by special delivery. Sit down, Matt. You play chess?”

“I know how the pieces move.”

“Then you know the game. That’s all it is, you just move the pieces till somebody wins.” He snatched up a pawn in each hand, held his hands behind his back, then presented me with both fists. I tapped one and he opened it to disclose a white pawn.

“See?” he said. “You’re a winner already, you get to make the first move. Set ’em up and we’ll play. No stakes, just to pass the time.”

There was another plastic milk crate on the opposite side of the table from him. I perched on it and set up my men, studied them, then advanced the king’s pawn two spaces. He answered in kind and we both made a few unsurprising opening moves. When I brought out my bishop to menace his knight he said, “Ah, the old Ruy Lopez.”

“If you say so,” I said. “Someone tried to teach me the names of the standard openings once, but it didn’t stick. I’m afraid I’ve got no head for the game.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Way you keep badmouthing yourself, seems like you’re trying to hustle me.”

“Dream on,” I said.

At first we both made our moves rapidly, but as the game developed I found it harder to come up with something and began spending more time studying the board. Ten or a dozen moves into the game we exchanged knights, and somehow I wound up a pawn down. A little further along he forced an exchange of his remaining knight for one of my rooks. With each move he was mobilizing his forces for an attack, and all I could do was await it. My position felt cramped, awkward, indefensible.