HE GOT TO THE STRIP club around eight, wearing a plaid cap, tinted glasses, and the little mustache he’d bought for a Halloween costume party a few years ago. He’d phoned ahead of time, so he knew she wasn’t starting until nine. Now the place had more strippers and bouncers in it than customers. What did he expect for a Monday night? Only two young guys in jeans in the seats by the runway, watching a coon girl give them the full monty. She lay on her back with her legs in a V, giving them time to inspect the unattainable merchandise, like a jeweler displaying his best diamond ring on black velvet for the impoverished groom-to-be. Three more strippers lounged on chairs in their ludicrous negligees and hot pants, smoking like their lives depended on it. One was keeping time to the horrible music by patting her thigh. He stood in the shadows against the wall.

The irony of it, finally finding out that Cooley was dating a stripper at Teasers. Where he liked to come and check out snatch once in a while himself, get a secondhand taste of what life had to offer.

All he’d wanted was to get his hands on the goddamn photo, and now he had to do a stripper.

He didn’t think he’d have to do the coon, because he was confident the coon would get the message. Underneath that uniform, Cooley was just another frightened nigger.

Okay, he thought feverishly, sipping his Seagram’s and Seven, I had thirty good years, thanks to Ed, a saint who kept his mouth shut, may he rest in peace. There was a stand-up guy, wouldn’t sell out his buddy. But goddamn, we were stupid. Fuck Connie, though, after all he’d done. You couldn’t count on women, anyway. His own daughter was dating a nigger! It was like a sick joke. You write the premise, and thirty years later God writes the punch line by having your seventeen-year-old show up with a coon whose father teaches biology at Brown! Everything was sucking him back into the past, where he didn’t want to be, but where he had to go to lay it to rest. Okay, so he’d had thirty years in the clear, so what if he had to do a little wet work to nail down the next thirty?

His right hand was shaking though, his drink sloshing a bit over the rim, so he switched the glass to his left. He’d gotten out of the business a long time ago, and he didn’t particularly like being in it again. He felt soft. What happened to the glib guy who’d do anything with a few drinks in him?

One of the lounging strippers got up and tried to engage him in conversation with a stupid cooing voice and a hand on his shoulder, the hand ending in purple press-on nails. The strobe was going now, making the whole scene look even less real than before. Maybe later, he mumbled, and turned from her. He walked toward the runway, then stopped, thinking these places all had to have hidden surveillance cameras, so he reversed course and left the curtained area, not looking any of the bouncers in the eye, and walked back out to case the parking lot again. He felt in his pockets for the little can of pepper spray.

He’d have to hit her with it while she was still in her car, before she got out. The parking lot was around the side of the converted brick building, away from the bouncer patrolling the entrance under the awning. He’d have to hit her and drive her out in her car.

He’d do her, but where? He had one idea that was too perfect. Once he got her in there, he’d have world and time enough to do what he wanted. The owner, as they say, was away. Of course, the owner would have an alibi. Still, who could deny that the presence of a stripper’s corpse in his bedroom would implicate him? There would be suppositions and inquiries, a smokescreen of hypotheses behind which he would sit, calmly doing his job.

He leaned against a cyclone fence in deep shadow, thinking what could be sadder than a strip club parking lot in Providence, Rhode Island, early on a Monday night. How the hell could this all end in a Providence parking lot? Of all the places he’d been—Nashville, Charlotte, Spartanburg, Philly—he’d never felt safer, further from his deed, than here in this ragged little white-bread corner of the country. Another of God’s jokes.

Well, he had a good one for God.