FROM THE SHADOWS OF the narrow alley that ran like a dingy fissure between two warehouses across from the players’ parking lot, he watched Cooley and the detective emerge from the stadium and walk to an unassuming silver Subaru. Maybe he had overshot with the jockey. He would have liked to have kept it just between Cooley and himself, a step at a time, until he got the message—all he’d wanted to do with the jockey was make the needed impression, cut through the clutter of hate mail without bringing the law into it, it was so goddamn hard to hit the right tone. Like writing condolence letters, he thought, chuckling at the analogy.

Anyway, one private detective didn’t exactly qualify as the law, a Jew no less.

He pulled on his second Seagram’s miniature, keeping just enough alcohol in his bloodstream to take the edge off his alarm. He had come too far to lose it now. Goddamn Ed, going off and dying without a word, his death the first link in the improbable chain of circumstance that now threatened to hang around his own neck. He wanted the chain around Cooley’s.

The important thing was to compartmentalize, that was the key, he’d done it all along and now he just had to keep doing it. At work he had to seem absolutely unchanged, no one could suspect, no one could know. Jesus, what would life be like if you couldn’t compartmentalize? All the bad endlessly flowing into the good and spoiling it? Just like the mixing of the races. Good fences make good neighbors. He sucked on the Seagram’s. Good and bad had to be kept apart, within and without, if it was all in one box you couldn’t make any sense of it. Jesus forgave you for your sins, let you wash them away, not put them in a goddamn box where someone could find them. And after everything he did for Ed’s wife.

The guard was letting the Subaru out of the lot now, the Jew driving and Cooley in the passenger seat with a hat mashed down on his head. He had to laugh, since he too was wearing a hat, a thrift shop fedora, he felt like Glenn Ford or George Raft or somebody in an old thriller. The Subaru turned out of the lot and drove off. He had to laugh at the fact they were in a Subaru instead of Cooley’s Range Rover. He had to laugh at all their wasted effort and motion. This was his power now, to be able to see all the unnecessary elaborations of the fear he had planted.

Like he was going to follow Cooley. Like he wasn’t watching him all the time anyway.