What had he said? Before he could speak again—he had already started a syllable—I flailed an elbow back into his throat. My aim was erratic; I hit him in the collarbone, which made my entire arm ring. Still, it shut him up. I took the opportunity to speak.

“Help!”

Amazingly, I was answered by a police siren. Maybe they were napping nearby, I thought. The sound spurred my attacker into flight. As I flipped over, I saw him making for the alley’s entrance. His hood hung down, but I could only see the back of his head.

He took a fast left and ran from sight. There was maybe a full minute of siren before the cop car showed, from the other direction. One cop stayed inside while another got out, cautiously. He looked into the alley, where I now sat, nursing my reverberating arm.

“Don’t move!”

“Don’t worry,” I replied.

He wasn’t amused. “I said, don’t move!”

Wincing, I put my hands up. What else could I do? He had a gun on me. Meanwhile, behind him, in the street, I alone saw a battered white Honda drive by at high speed.

—

“What’d you say you were doing there?”

Same precinct, same detective. Florent stood opposite me again, looking even more the Central Casting cop than before.

“He tried to rob me,” I said.

I didn’t say that it had to do with Clown, even though I figured that it had.

“This have something to do with The Day the Clown Cried?” Florent asked.

I closed my eyes, the lids feeling like they weighed a hundred pounds. My luck to always get this cop, who thought he was trivial.

“What?” I said. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.”

Florent only nodded, with a brief, unconvinced “Uh huh.”

“I mean, that’s really …” I was shaking my head now, clucking with disbelief, “just really crazy …”

“Maybe,” he shrugged a little. “Maybe.”

Before I could start on a new boring trivial discourse—my only line of defense against him, short of crying—Florent had hiked up his pants and left the room.

I rolled my eyes, relieved. Then, with great difficulty, I lifted my bruised body out of the hardwood interrogation chair. There was nothing for the police to hold me on. But maybe I should have asked for their protection.

—

A few minutes later, on a borrowed cell phone, I called my mother’s house. Aunt Ruby told me there’d been no change in Mom’s condition. But she’d been secretly ordering more pay-per-view movies—sneaking off again, as it were, to the movies.

“I haven’t seen anything in the mail from you,” Ruby said, brusquely. “But maybe our mailbox is broken.”

Guiltily, I felt in my pocket for the hundreds Howie had chucked at me. I’d have to send the cash in the mail. I hadn’t received any more money since Abner’s first check.

Speaking of Abner, should I tell him what was going on? I had to let him know where I was headed, after all. But when I called his apartment, his boyfriend answered.

“Abner’s in the hospital,” Taylor Weinrod told me.

I felt a jolt of panic. Had Stanley Lager struck again? And if so, why?

“It’s gout,” he explained. “I’ve been wheeling him around the apartment in a swivel chair.”

“Jesus,” I said. “I thought only fifteenth-century kings got that.”

“Abner always appreciated the past, you know that,” Taylor said, indulgently.

I felt even more impatient than ever with Abner’s excesses. I left the new address where I could be reached. Then I hung up.

I made one more call. I hoped Dena would pick up Howie’s guesthouse phone.

She did.

“I’ve been so worried,” she told me. “Howie came back and told me what happened at the club. Well, he said as much as he could between gropes. He was a little, shall we say, worked up. I didn’t mean to hit him that hard. But it’s no way to ask a girl to marry you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Meeting me apparently gave him new clarity about his own life.”

“More than you know. He told me he was coming out of retirement. Then, after I turned down his proposal, he told Luna she’d been paying too much attention to herself and not enough to Elliot. Then he canned me.”

“Jeez. That’s rough.”

“It’s okay. Maybe it was time to move on,” she said. “You and I will split up. Then reconnoiter.”

I explained that the white-faced driver in the Hamptons had followed me to the tennis club and then to the city. I said that, while beating me, he’d asked, “Where is it?” More than that I didn’t know.

“Where are you going to go?” I asked.

“I guess to Maine. I have to close up my father’s old place. Maybe there’ll be more information.” She paused, then spoke with real feeling. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out with Howie, Roy.”

“Well,” I said, “let’s put it this way. I’m not where I was before.”

She took this in.

“Where can I reach you?” she asked. “In New York?”

“No,” I replied. “As a matter of fact, in L.A.”

After I finished explaining, I handed the cell phone back to its owner. We were standing outside the police station, next to her limo.

Marthe Ludwig, Thor’s wife, said she’d wait while I packed my stuff.

MARTHE HAD ACTUALLY CALLED HOWIE’S HOUSE, LOOKING FOR ME. WHILE she was friendly on our ride to the airport, her manner was also businesslike.