WOKE UP ON WEDNESDAY MORNING AND I HONESTLY hadn’t thought I would. After I left the Blue Knight I had a breakdown in the car on the way home. The car didn’t break down. I did. Weeping. Pounding on the windows. I ran inside when I got home.

A guy who looked like Ricardo Montalban was sneaking out of Mrs. Ramona’s apartment—clutching a bunch of clothes. It didn’t really surprise me. Old Lothario winked at me and dropped a pair of pants going out the hall door. He didn’t notice and I didn’t tell him. I picked them up. I didn’t want anyone gossiping about Mrs. R.

God only knows what they’d say about me. Things could get complicated. I snuggled on the bed with Pico, trying to understand what had happened. I couldn’t. I just cried, wondering when it would end. If it would end.

I’d taken on female form—and not just any female. I’d transformed into someone who looked just like Stacy. I wasn’t sick in the head—something more pervasive and profound had happened. The thought of my appointment with the psychologist seemed absurd. I reached for the Sidewinder’s sleep pills. I’d meant to take them all, hoping not to wake up—just wanting to dissolve like a capsule in water. But I didn’t. I hadn’t been able to face down El Miedo or the nightmares before. For all those years. And so the ghosts just kept coming. Until I became one of them myself. And now I was finding human form again. Only a different one.

When I woke the second time I’d returned to outer male appearance but not my old self. Stacy had been about 5’8” and I figured I was an inch taller and still quite a bit heavier. My equipment had shrunk to the size of a chick embryo. Inside I could feel a distinct change though. A different kind of being. I didn’t know if it was female—or something more alien. Suddenly all those tabloid stories about people being abducted by Martians didn’t seem so laughable. Maybe that’s what Genevieve was. Something from far away—only a woman outwardly, which it seemed she could modify at will. All the time before I’d tried to believe I was going insane and having hallucinations. How simple they seemed compared to the truth.

But I could feel my reversion wasn’t complete. I realized I’d had a few of these episodes now. That’s what the blackout escapades had been. They seemed to be getting more intense.

Then, when I was in the kitchen getting Pico some food I noticed that the images on the Foto Booth strip had materialized more fully. The woman’s face had become clearer and more confident—and much more attractive. A heartbreaker.

The final frame was almost a spitting image of Stacy wearing my too-big sports coat. It was like a police Identikit. Morph my face into a beautiful frozen blonde. Mid-30s. Like an angel with a mood disorder. But you could still recognize my eyes.

Like the tracks of the Scenic Railway, Mistress Genevieve’s powers extended far beyond normal expectation—and I wondered how much tape would be needed to cordon off the crime scene of her influence. What kind of tape I couldn’t even imagine.

My cell phone rang. It seemed to go off like gelignite after all the silence. Her? No. Padgett. Shit. I couldn’t take the call. I couldn’t. It was like something from another time, another life.

I let it ring through to voicemail. A moment later the message signal beeped. Chris sounded concerned—but trying to be cheerful, which only made him sound more anxious. He was paired up with Monty short term, with Haslett floating. He made a joke about that. Monty wanted to set me up with this woman named Elena, a nice Hispanic babe he and his wife had met at their Latin Dance Class. Said she was shaped like an art deco lamp. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. I was too wigged out to picture Head and Shoulders and his big mama learning to salsa. Jesus de Christophe. A nice Hispanic woman trawling dance classes for a Mambo King out on a date with yours drooly! And they say irony is something you study in high school. My mind was a mess and hearing the Cub’s voice only made it muddier.

What was even worse, my old Birch thinking was still very much at work. Big ham-fisted dumb ideas—like whether taking it up the butt as a woman would be different than as a man. How’s that for honesty, huh? I always did have a knack for scaring myself. Guess I hadn’t lost my touch that way.

Which made me ask the question if it was at all possible to scare the Dark Mistress. She had to have some vulnerability, some side entrance. That’s what a large part of my job and in fact my whole life had been—finding people’s weaknesses and bearing down on them until they broke apart. Maybe something of those old skills could come into play now—now that I knew how serious and how fucking whacko things really were. I’d been playing too short a game against an opponent beyond my estimation. But everything was different now. Not only me.

I realized that knowing about Genevieve—and I didn’t know nearly enough obviously—but now the scent of what appeared to be her body—the soft but viselike whisper of her mind in mine—the afterimages of her entering me with the vestige of my own stolen maleness—that changed the world. Not just my body. The whole damn rulebook went right out the window. Right through the mirror.

I looked at the clock. The appointment with the shrink Lance had arranged for me was coming up. As he’d never seen me before, he probably wouldn’t notice anything. But the other people in my building would. Soon there’d be more questions than I could cope with. I was starting to understand what had happened to Stoakes and Whitney—and Cracker Jack. The 10-10 furlough. How would I end it, if it came to that?

While others on the job had bought into the Glock, I’d called in the marker on my seniority to select the SIG P-229. I liked the feel of it. But now I’d turned it in—and my .22 LR boot gun too. I’d re-registered my old personal Walther PPK in Polly’s name for her protection. The modified Thunder Ranch carbine and the choke-bore Savage were locked up at our old place for their protection. And mine. Suddenly, I was short of stopping power. Just when I needed it most. You see, I really do have an honest streak when it comes to some things.

The sharpness of that thought got me focused. If nothing else talking with a stranger couldn’t hurt. It was something to try. I put on the female underwear from the night before. Why not? Maybe I’d had a kink before and not admitted it. Now it was part of the training, like shooting off rounds at the course. There was enough support for my shriveled genitals, and I somehow felt comfortable in them. I rolled up the sleeves from the shirt I’d bought—and it sort of worked. It was warm out—the harsh heat of summer coming early. I didn’t need a jacket. The one I’d bought the other day was too big now anyway. As were the pants. Then I remembered the trousers Mrs. Ramona’s friend had dropped. They actually fit. I slipped the strip of Foto Booth pics in my chest pocket, snuck out of the building as quick as I could, and drove over to the shrink’s office at Republic and Cass. His name was Turcell and I tried to picture what he’d look like as I missed every stoplight.

The guy who ushered me into his salmon-carpeted office with a lead gray leatherette couch and teak-finish Formica desk, turned out to be about 50, lean and springy like a fitness maven, with thinning hair. He’d just given himself a spray of a mid-range Yves St. Laurent fragrance and he wore a buff-colored sports jacket over a pesto cotton shirt. I was certain he’d never handled a handgun, let alone had one pointed at him.

My old cop sense was on full suction, silky panties or not. The thought and feel of them actually gave me a little erection. Little being the operative word.

He probably thought I was somehow trying to skate on work. That’s where people who aren’t on the job can’t understand it. He’d have no Yves St. Laurent way of knowing that I missed hobnobbing with the abrasive caseworkers and the hardbitten parole officers. I missed signing in and signing out. I missed the clumpy white powder soap in the wash room. I missed Chris’ banter and Monty’s dandruff. I missed them all.

He took his seat and motioned to a foam filled chair on the other side of the desk. Then he stroked a hand over his head, the way that guys with thinning hair do. He gave his wedding ring a twist. There was a group of family photos behind him—his kids holding out cards with their names on them, and a foursome of adults holding up their racquets on a tennis court. He had an Art Gallery calendar angled at the edge of his blotter. The featured artist was Jackson Pollock. I’d at least heard of him. The sample work looked like a kid’s painting.

“I’m glad you came in to see me,” he began. “You look like you want to talk.”

“Yeah,” I said, staring at the photos on his window ledge, the degrees mounted on the wall and all the shelves lined with books. Everything was so perfectly in order. I wondered what Genevieve would say. Would he be more resistant to her, or would he fall that much faster?

“So,” he prompted, smoothing his thinning hair. “I know confidentially that you were involved in an on-the-job shooting a while back. Please tell me about it.”

“I was shot at close range in the groin by a drug addict and informer that I’d been screwing,” I responded. “I was obsessed with her.”

“Hm. How were you obsessed?” he asked, perking up. Then he added, “Please remember that everything you say is confidential.”

“I met her as part of a case I was working,” I replied. “One thing led to another, as it often does—or has with me. She reminded me of someone else—from the past. Before I knew it I was sneaking out on my wife all the time and fucking this chick every chance I could get.”

“So, it was like an addiction.”

“It wasn’t like an addiction,” I corrected. “It was an addiction.”

“How did being with her make you feel?”

“Good at the time. Bad later. Awful. But better than the dead feeling before I met her.”

“How did the shooting come about?” he asked, his voice still as even as his books.

Christ, people wall themselves in with a lot of crap. As if anyone with any jimmy can’t see right through them. But I was going to give his little ping-pong game a shot.

“I told her it was over. I made a pretense of a police matter on the day it happened. But it was personal. And to be honest, I knew what would happen. I think I wanted her to kill me.”

“Really?” he frowned. “Why?”

“I don’t have a bunch of smiling faces at my desk like you,” I said. “And I couldn’t face my wife anymore. I barely wanted to touch her and I couldn’t get a hard-on for her without pharmacy help. We made each other sick and I knew she could smell what was going on.”

“Smell is a very strong word,” he remarked—and the way he said it made it look like he’d just caught a whiff of something festering.

“Neither of my two wives was stupid,” I answered. “Only me.”

He fingered his hair again, thinking what to say. “I very much appreciate your candor, Detective Ritter,” he decided.

I couldn’t recall the last time someone had called me that.

“Most of the people I talk to I can talk to for weeks—and even years, and they’re not as open as you’ve just been.”

“Maybe I’m finally growing up,” I answered.

He nodded again and then started musing.

“So, you’ve been divorced twice. No children?”

“None that I know of.”

“Tell me about your state of mind when you met this girl. You said she reminded you of someone. Was there an earlier incident?”

How could I explain to him that my life was only “incidents”? It was the marriages that had been the deviations.

“I fell for a hooker,” I replied. “Wanted to be a lounge singer. She was the best sex I’d ever had. Very kinky—but innocent and teenage too sometimes. It happened when my second wife was pregnant. She lost the baby.”

“And you blamed yourself?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

I kept looking at those happy pictures staring at me. The color of the carpet. The messy masterpiece of Jackson Pollock.

“Well, let me ask you briefly about your childhood. I don’t want to get bogged down in the past when there are problems in the present that worry you. But very often the key to problems in the moment lies in the past.”

“I’ve heard that,” I said and managed not to laugh. “My father was thought to have committed suicide, but he was really murdered. Pushed off a construction scaffold—he was a builder—when I was 10 years old. He was really gay … doing young guys he hired to work for him. He couldn’t cope with other people knowing. One of his young friends gave him a push because he wouldn’t come out in the open with it. I saw it happen—and I never told anyone. Just let the young guy skip. He was the older brother of one of my best friends. I’m pretty certain he’s dead now—either of drugs and alcohol or violence like the kind he was used to.”

“I see,” Turcell said—not seeing at all, only stroking the remains of his hair. “And—and you never told anyone?”

“I made sure my mother confronted my old man’s sex thing, although I’m sure now she already knew.”

“What did you do?”

“I found a jar of bloody Vaseline in his truck. I put it on her dresser. I guess Dad didn’t like the texture of lubricant. Or maybe he was just old school.”

“Hmm,” he murmured, stroking and stroking. “Did you understand what you were doing?”

“Sure. And no, not really. What kid could? I wouldn’t have understood at all—I mean what in hell is blood doing in a Vaseline jar? But I saw him actually doing Jake. Had him bent over a pile of roofing tiles, pumping him like a girl. Only real hard. More like some kind of animal.”

My earnest host took an openly deep breath at this, crossing and uncrossing his legs.

“That must have been … a very difficult thing … to witness.”

Witness. Another name for spying. He wouldn’t have lasted one day on the job.

“Yeah,” I agreed, stroking my hair in time with him. “It was even more difficult because my Dad wore a hard hat to work. He could sink a nail faster than you can log onto your computer. I knew what I was doing—but I didn’t know anything. I was a kid.”

“Did he … ever …”

“No! He was a good dad. He never touched me that way ever. He kept that all bottled up and ready to shoot out for others.”

“But you carry the scars.”

“You don’t carry scars,” I said. “You wear them—like clothes that always fit, whether you want them to or not. I’m sorry he died. I loved him, even though he lied and lived a lie. He tried his best to make it true. And I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies over the years. I don’t like to think what his must’ve looked like. That I didn’t look at. But I know that what happened would’ve happened whether I was there or not.”

“And how did it affect you? Did other people know?”

“About him screwing younger guys up the rear? My mother knew, well before my little offering, I’m sure. My sister, sort of. I always thought other people did too.”

“Did you worry what they would think of you?”

“I later beat a sissy from my school who’d come onto me. Soon after, he hanged himself in his parents’ garage.”

Shit, he wasn’t sure how to take this, and I thought maybe I’d swamped him. But he recovered.

“Tell me about your sister.”

“She was two years older than me. She died three days before my attack on the other kid. She was an epileptic. It made her shy and sort of immature.”

“How did she die?”

“I invited her up to the tree fort. Dad had built it for us back when we were little. When Mom got remarried, we rediscovered it. My friends and I went up there to hang out and read Playboys. Then one day a girl came along—and her brother. A couple more kids.”

“And you included your sister?”

“We had a complicated relationship. I was jealous of her because she got special treatment, and she didn’t always treat me nice.”

“So …” he struggled. “W-was there some kind of game? A sex game maybe—with others—your friends involved? And it went wrong?”

“That’s one way to put it,” I replied. Maybe he had some cop in him after all.

“Is it the right way to put it?”

“Don’t know. Didn’t know then. Less sure now. I was just trying to lose my cherry—to bust my nut like a guy should do. I’d like to think it was something innocent that happened to Serena—and she just had a seizure and fell. But we all want to be innocent, don’t we?”

“No, Mr. Ritter,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s strangely not true. And I’d actually think you’d know that. Some people—in fact all of us at some point in our lives—want to be guilty. We want to be judged. And we want to be punished.”

Damn me, I was starting to like him a bit. He was on a roll.

“Oh, there are lots of times—maybe most times—where we try to get away with things. But sooner or later a situation comes up where we judge ourselves, for whatever reason. We find ourselves guilty and we want the larger world to reach the same verdict. We’re all quite capable of sentencing ourselves much more punitively than any court or parent—or even God, if your belief inclines that way.”

“You may be right,” I sighed. Then I paused, letting him savor that little speech before I started in on the real issues. What was the point of talking to him, if I didn’t fuck him up?

“How much would you say I weigh?” I asked at last.

“Oh,” he pondered. “Maybe 170 pounds.”

“What would you say if I told you only a few days ago I weighed 230?”

“I’d be very much surprised,” he snipped, looking quite a bit surprised. I could tell he felt the conversation slipping into new territory. “That’s a dramatic and disturbing weight loss in such a short period—and for someone apparently reasonably healthy.”

You’re telling me, I thought. Then I stood up and asked, “How tall am I?”

“5’ 9”. Maybe a hair less.” He smoothed his hair again.

“What if I said I was a good 6’ 3”? Or I used to be—just a little while ago.”

He hesitated at this, and then responded carefully, “I’d get out a tape measure and show you otherwise. But let me be clear, are you saying your body has changed size—that in a matter of days you believe you’ve lost more than 50 pounds? And that you also believe you were recently several inches taller?”

“Yeah,” I said, sitting back down. “And it’s continuing.”

He wasn’t so detached now. He was starting to think he had a live one. Maybe he’d get some sort of case study he could write up.

“You feel like … you’re shrinking in size?”

“I don’t feel like it, I am,” I replied. “I’m changing. I’m becoming something else. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Not that some drug slut tried to shoot my balls off or that my old man was a fag.”

Suddenly all his grad school theories about childhood traumas and self-punishment didn’t add up to so much. But he kept his superficial cool. I’ve always admired that.

“I see,” he said. “That must be very concerning to you. What do your friends say?”

“I don’t have any friends left,” I answered, but I saw the tack he was taking.

“What about your co-workers?”

“A few comments got made a couple of days ago. Since then I haven’t been in to work. The changes have accelerated hard.”

“And now you’re afraid of going back. Because you think they’ll notice?”

“Believe me, they’d notice!”

He didn’t smile at this. He swiveled around to examine the photos of his family and a funny, distant expression crossed his face.

The real trick is always to let people interrogate themselves. Beating the pulp out of them only works on some—and I’ve actually never had much luck that way with women.

“You know …” he muttered. “This is a little odd, and I don’t mean to digress, but you’ve reminded me of something—from my past.

“When I was in college, I worked part-time as a night janitor, cleaning office buildings. And sometimes for a laugh, the guy who worked with me—I can’t remember his name—we’d rearrange the employees’ personal photos. Once we did an experiment—my first psychological experiment I realize. We gathered up some of our old personal photos and put them in this one fellow’s office. He worked in accounts for a mutual company. Jacob Betz. I don’t know why we chose him, other than that he didn’t have any pictures up. But when we went back on that floor a week later, I noticed he hadn’t taken them down. When we came back in that building a month later, the photos were still there on his shelf. An unrelated group of complete strangers looking out at him every day.”

“Some people go through their whole lives asleep,” I said blandly. Why is that strangers are always complete or total, and the rest of us are only trying? What the hell.

“True,” Turcell nodded, still lost in his memory. “But this case was unusual. One night a few weeks after that we went back again to clean and found that his office had been emptied. Our photos were gone. I got curious and made a fake call the next day. Mr. Betz no longer worked there. I pressed a bit harder and learned that he’d just passed away. Sudden heart attack. I found out a couple of his workmates were holding a service for him. There were four other people there beside us. We made up some story about how we knew him—the guy I worked with. Poor Mr. Betz had no family, no friends really, other than a few fellow employees. At the service, the photos we’d slipped into his office were prominently displayed. The woman who worked next door to him had wondered about their appearance out of the blue—but she hadn’t wanted to pry. She’d even tried reaching the people—my aunt and uncle from Muncie no less—to let them know about Mr. Betz.”

“That’s sad,” I said.

You know if it’s sad, it’s probably true—or tells a truth.

“I think that might’ve been the defining incident that led me to pursue psychology,” he acknowledged, as if I’d asked. “I’m sorry to have gone off on a tangent. But you got me thinking about photos—what’s actually there versus what we want to see—and what conclusions we draw from what we end up seeing.”

“I always like other people’s stories more than my own,” I answered.

“I guess I mean that we could examine some old photos of you. And we could take a photo of you right now to compare—to have as reference for your next visit. I think that would allay some of your anxieties.”

My anxieties.

“You don’t believe me?” I asked pointedly.

“I’m not saying that,” he returned. “All I mean is that any physical changes you’ve undergone, or are undergoing, can be documented. Analyzed. We can look at old and recent photos. We can weigh you, stand you against a wall and mark your height with a pencil. Scans, X-rays and blood tests can be done.”

I was sorely tempted to pull out my ace card right then. But then I thought, why do his job for him? I was still hoping he’d have something to tell me. Something I hadn’t thought of. Something that might—save me. More fool me.

“So …” he continued, looking nothing like he had at the start of the interview. He was fully engaged now. Animated. Wracking his brain. “What other changes are you aware of? You said you were becoming someone else …”

“Some thing else,” I corrected.

He started a bit at this. Then I let him have it.

“At first I thought I was changing—into a woman. Now … I think I’m turning into … some kind of creature. A female creature.”

The office went dead still at that.

“I … see …” he said, and I could see him gripping the edge of the desk. The Formica, the leatherette, the family photos, the textbook cases and the recollections of every deranged thing people had said inside that office—it all was opening into a hole before him. He had to grab on to something.

“I must tell you,” he said softly, and with effort. “That you don’t look like some sort of creature—or female—to me.”

“Not just now,” I agreed. “But I can transform. The episodes are like seizures.”

“Trances?”

“Attacks. And they’re happening more frequently. More fully. When I change back, I’m not changing all the way back. Look at my hands for instance. Each time I become less myself and more … I don’t know what.”

I held out what used to be massive knuckledusters with digits that had been broken repeatedly. They were slender and shapely now. Smooth. Feminine. Like the hands a lot of men imagine stroking them.

“You do have very delicate hands,” he admitted. “But some men do.”

Case in point.

“I’ve lost body hair,” I continued. “And my butt is rounder. I’m developing breasts. My dick has shrunk. And when the transformation takes place, it disappears entirely and a cavity opens up. A … vagina …”

I let that last word really sink in.

“Mr. Ritter,” he tried, finding his voice again. “I know that what you’re telling me is difficult and disturbing for you. It’s concerning for me to hear. But believe me, as—as frightening as it may seem, these are not entirely uncommon delusions. Men frequently have been known—”

“Delusions?”

“Distortion of perceptions. Unwanted fantasies.”

“This isn’t about some distortion in my head—it’s about one in my crotch,” I simmered. “I’m not talking about bad dreams I’m having. I’m talking about a nightmare I’m living.”

He sprung up from his chair as if he was charging the net in tennis and reached for one of the many volumes on his fake teak shelves. I hoped to hell it wasn’t going to be DSM.

It turned out to be a much thinner book with a blue spine. He fanned the pages and then found what he was looking for. I was afraid he was going to tell me something about male rats under stress. Instead he read aloud, “He described seeing and hearing a voice from another head, that was set on his own shoulders, attached to his body and trying to dominate his own head. He believed the other head was that of his wife’s gynecologist whom he believed to be having an affair with her.”

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“It’s an extreme case of autoscopy, the self-shooting of a phantom head reported by a clinician named Ames. The patient was suffering from schizophrenia.”

“So,” I almost yawned. “You think I’m nutso and you can’t help me.”

“I think you’re suffering from a powerful delusion,” he answered soberly. “And in looking at this book, I’m reminded that its author, Andrew Sims, defines delusions as ‘abnormal knowledge,’ which is how I should’ve characterized them. It’s precisely because of this that I think I can help you. If you were to undergo some molecular or cellular transformation before my eyes, I’d be much less certain of being able to assist.”

I half snickered. It’s always when vaginas suddenly appear that men stop feeling so confident. Then the coin that had been in the slot since I sat down dropped with a ring.

“Let me tell you something else,” I said, getting more comfortable in the foam-back chair. “You spoke about judging earlier. Well, I’ll let you be the judge of whether this is abnormal knowledge or not. A part of the change that’s happening to me is that I can read men better now. For instance, I know there’s another woman who’s caught your eye. Maybe where you play tennis. It hasn’t gone anywhere yet—and it probably won’t—because she’s just a symptom of a deeper problem. A deeper problem you have.”

“Really?” he said, not quite sneering, but close.

“You’re frustrated with your wife. You wish she’d be both more assertive and submissive in bed. You feel like you should know how to talk to her because you’re a shrink, but it’s tough for a barber to cut his own hair.”

He opened his hands. “Those sorts of generalizations apply to the majority of middle-aged married men.”

“You’d like to engage in some light S&M,” I replied, and his forehead wrinkled up beautifully.

“A bit of spanking and some role playing. You’ve never been involved in a threesome—you’re worried about how you’d perform with another woman with your wife there. Although you’d like to try. But what you’d really like is to introduce another man.”

His face had tightened up and I could hear his breathing. There was an alkaline sweat scent under his Yves St. Laurent cologne now.

“You’re afraid of what your wife would think if you suggested this. But you think about it a lot. In fact, it’s why you’re attracted to this other woman. Something in her makes you think she’d be more open to that sort of thing. You haven’t been aware that that’s what appeals to you about her, but now you’ll see it plain.”

“How do you think—you know this?” he asked, and he sounded genuinely curious now.

“Call it feminine intuition,” I said. “But here’s the most important point. You’ve only lied to me and to yourself once since I’ve been here. And as you probably know, lies tell more truth than truth.”

“What—have I lied about?” he coughed.

“The name of the guy you worked with cleaning offices,” I told him. “You remember his name all right—and for the simple reason that you had sex with him. On more than one occasion. Probably during those late nights in other people’s offices. It meant something to you, and you’ve never been able to deal with it. Now all these years later, bored and disappointed with the sex that you occasionally do have with your wife, you’ve been thinking of him again. You’ve thought of him at various points in your marriage. But in the last year he’s come back strongly in your mind.”

“Mr. Ritter, this is the most extraordinary thing you’ve said yet.”

“Let me go one better. What would you say if I could tell you his name?”

He blanched openly at this.

“Are you afraid? I’m sorry,” I said, getting to my feet. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Really.”

“No!” he gasped. “Tell … me … the name …”

“Andrew Pollock.”

The effect this had on the good psychologist was even more than I’d reckoned. He exhaled so deeply, he had to burp back air to remain balanced in his chair. His face seemed to crack and reform, and I thought he’d either break into tears or go into cardiac arrest.

“How … in hell … do you know that!” he cried finally.

I let him hang. He’d forgotten that I’d probably conducted a lot more interviews, and a lot more serious ones than he had. Despite what was happening to me, I was still a cop somewhere inside, and a shrewd one if not always a respectable one. He could’ve stonewalled—but when the crunch came, he gave himself away. Just the way he’d wanted to, without even knowing.

When I was good and ready, I went on. “As I told you, something’s happening to me. Something much weirder than what’s just brought you unglued. But part of what’s happening to me is that I’ve woken up. I’m more attentive than I’ve been—maybe more than is natural.”

“But how …?” he wheezed.

“Consider it a party trick,” I answered. “You’re an open book. Your clothes, your cologne, the décor of this office. Then there are the family photos, placed behind you so that you don’t have to look at them—they look out. Notice the center one, the family shot. I can see from here that the kids are holding up name cards, only the cards are wrong. Andrew is holding up Cynthia’s card—Cynthia has Sean’s and young Sean can’t seem to decide which of the three he is. It’s a family joke about how much time you spend outside the home—remember us kids? The two pictures that include your wife flank the children, which says a lot. Yet the children are smiling. You’re probably as good a dad as you know how to be given how busy you are—and who you are.

“On the surface you’ve got a happy family. But look a little deeper—or from a different angle. The two pics that show your wife are your wedding photo taken ages ago, and a group gathering at your tennis club, and from the looks of you and the budding trees in the background, I’d guess it was taken very recently. Your wife is part of the other doubles team—and is on the other side of the net. The sandy blonde woman right next to you is the one you’ve been thinking about.”

“That’s remarkable,” Turcell blurted. “I swear to you nothing has happened.”

“Oh, I believe you,” I confessed. “But it gets better—and simpler. Look around this office. Everything has its place. It’s excessively organized. Yet there is one thing obviously askew. I’ll come back to it. I noticed it the moment I sat down. Let me go on.

“Someone comes to see you. A male. You freshen your cologne. You know he’s a cop who was shot under tawdry circumstances—an appointment arranged by a concerned colleague of his. You find out, not surprisingly, that there’s been a lot wrong in his life. Sadness. Violence. Rawness. Then he tells you something that really is surprising: he’s changing shape. He’s lost significant weight—and more improbably, height. What does that do? It triggers a memory in you. In this overly neat, professional office, you suddenly interject a very personal story. Why? Because you hear something in him that resonates with you, even without realizing it.

“So, what of the story you told? You acknowledge that it involved a crucial incident in your life—it influenced your career choice. Hadn’t thought of it in years, huh? Then you claim you don’t remember the name of your fellow janitor—but you talk of pranks and mischief—not merely on an isolated occasion—but a pattern of behavior. What’s more, you went together to Betz’s funeral—as a couple. You didn’t see it then, but you may now—what you described is conspiratorial behavior. People remember who they engage in conspiracies with. Believe me. They choose those kinds of accomplices more carefully than marriage partners. That’s why most marriages fail. They aren’t conspiratorial enough. I knew the second you said you couldn’t remember his name—a dismissal within an admission, the first rule of interrogation—that you were hiding something—and because of your occupation and training, I reasoned you were trying to hide it as much from yourself as from me.”

The expression on his face was priceless.

“Our interview progresses—I relate to you even more outlandish things. So you go to open up a book. But which one? Look at how many you have to choose from. Literally hundreds—and many, many of them filled with more outrageous and more relevant anecdotes than the one you presented. If men, as you claimed, frequently have the kind of abnormal fantasies you attribute to me, then why didn’t you cite one of those? No, you selected a case about a phantom head. I didn’t see the connection to my problems, so I considered there must’ve been some other factor at work in your selection—an underlying struggle or debate you’ve been having with yourself. The first name of the author of that book is the same as your first son: Andrew. It’s not an uncommon name, but its appearance twice in the midst of an uncommon discussion said something—and when I put it together with the other factor, and all the other sense data that had been coming in, I had my hunch.”

“But what—what was the other factor?” he asked, almost pleading.

“Look at your desk calendar,” I said. “The featured artist is Jackson Pollock.”

“He’s a famous artist. Or was.”

“Everyone in that calendar is I’d bet,” I countered. “The trouble is it’s almost June now, and his month is February.”

“Well, I probably went back to check some meeting date,” he insisted.

“Of course,” I nodded. “And you have a calf-hide datebook right beside your phone. Plus you have a computer, which I know has a spreadsheet calendar—and you have a new secretary, who looks just like a younger version of your tennis friend, to keep you up to date. That’s exactly why the calendar is all the more revealing. Pollock isn’t such a common name.”

I didn’t think he was going to stop shaking his head. I was glad I’d laid it out for him, because he’d have thought I’d been stalking him otherwise. I rose from the chair, listening to the subtle hiss of the foam regaining its usual shape and enjoying the silky panties’ texture.

“Don’t worry,” I assured him. “Confidentiality runs both ways.”

“He killed himself!” Turcell ejaculated. “Over the last Christmas holiday. I only found out in February. I’d seen him just once or twice in the last few years. Nothing ever happened. But I knew he was troubled. I didn’t know what to say. Then he called and I—I ignored him.”

“Maybe there wasn’t anything to say,” I said, feeling sorry I hadn’t left faster.

“I’m a psychologist!” he warbled, and I could see he wanted to wipe every book off every shelf. “We’d had—a bit—of an affair—after I’d gotten married. I couldn’t open all those old doors again. He was an illustrator. He’d moved to New York, and whenever he was in town, we’d catch up for a drink. Nothing—sexual—after the affair. It was all in the past.”

“Almost everything is,” I said, and let him weep, elbows planted on the Formica, the ghostly faces of his happy kids looking on. I didn’t think it was square to leave until he’d gotten a hold of himself. When he finally did, he gazed up at me plaintively.

“I’m so sorry about this. I could—and would be happy to give you a referral, although I doubt you’d want that. If it’s any consolation, I think I’ll be much less certain I can help anyone in the future.”

I tried to smile at him and I think I did. Jesus lord, the scams we try to run.

“Don’t judge yourself too harshly,” I said at last. “Maybe this is just the old detective in me talking … but you might want to do some more investigating into what kind of crime was actually committed. An obstruction or even an abetting charge is very different from pulling the trigger. People end their lives for lots of reasons. You owed him courtesy not salvation.”

I turned toward the fake teak door.

“Mr. Ritter,” he called gently. “Maybe … this is just the foolish tennis playing closet homosexual psychologist in me talking … but perhaps you shouldn’t think of what’s happening to you—whatever it is—as all bad.”

“No,” I conceded, with my hand on the door knob. “You’re absolutely right. And that’s the most worrisome part of all.”

When I was alone in the elevator going down, I pulled out the strip of photos I was going to show him. Up until but a few hours ago my world had been full of witness statements, ballistic reports, bulletin boards, mug shots, blood stains on sidewalks and fattening food in unmarked vans. Now, like Mr. Betz, I saw a stranger more complete than myself.