Susanne Hearne was prettier dead than she’d been alive, but only in the face. She lay in a casket in the First Presbyterian Church. The church was big blocks of stone, stained-glass windows, pews that wouldn’t batter a man’s ass or soul too harshly. The church was nice. The casket was nicer.

If people were coming to mourn Susanne Hearne, they were coming later. The church was shut up tight. The air was measuring a noose for Sam’s neck. Summer heat and beeswax and death. In one of the windows, Mary was lit up with blue fire, and Joseph wasn’t doing a damned thing to put her out. It was that kind of day, and that kind of church, and Sam hadn’t slept a wink the night before, and that only made things worse.

The churchman—reverend or pastor or preacher or pope, Sam didn’t know—stood, stiff as Christ on the cross and twice as ugly, a few feet back. He didn’t approve, but he didn’t look like the approving sort.

Edmund Hearne stood next to Sam. He had a new suit on, and it was obvious that the suit was new, and it was obvious that Hearne wanted people to know. He had a dead wife in a casket, he had a silk handkerchief in his hand, and he had a new suit, and a blind man could tell he liked the suit best.

“Where?” Sam asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Where are the wounds?”

Hearne gathered the handkerchief into his fist.

“Was she shot?” Sam said.

A long moment passed. Then Hearne said, “Stabbed.”

“Where?”

“Her stomach. And chest.” Hearne leaned forward and he creaked when he did. “I won’t have my wife subjected to that kind of scrutiny, Mr. Turner. I already know who killed her.”

“Matias Kurtz.”

Hearne nodded.

Susanne Hearne was dead and she wouldn’t smile ever again. Sam hadn’t liked that smile, not really. It had been like stumbling out of the brush and being nose to nose with a lioness. He hadn’t liked the smile, but the world was a poorer place without it. He hadn’t liked Susanne Hearne much, either, or maybe he’d liked her too much, or maybe it had been both. Either way, the world was poorer without her too.

“You called the police.”

Hearne sniffed. “They came. They’ve gone through everything in the house and can’t string together a single reasonable sentence.”

“They said it was a burglary gone wrong.”

“How do you know that?”

“Maybe it was a burglary gone wrong.”

“Nothing was taken.”

“That was the part that went wrong, then.”

“I want you to find Kurtz. I told the police, but they couldn’t catch a cold.”

“You want me to find him.”

“I want you to find him. And I want you to bring him to me.”

“I figured as much.”

“I’ll double what I’m paying you.”

“Screw it,” Sam said. He bent down, kissed Susanne Hearne on the cheek, and wondered if he would have liked her if he’d met her another way. He wondered if he even liked her now.

“You’ll do it, won’t you?” Hearne said. “I want him, Mr. Turner. I get what I want.”

“Don’t suppose you did it, did you?”

Hearne’s handkerchief fell from his fist. “Did what?”

“Killed her. Pretty young wife with a pretty young boy, and you out in the cold.”

“Watch yourself, Mr. Turner. Watch yourself very closely.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Hearne.”

“You’ll find Kurtz, then?”

Sam walked out of the church without looking back. The reverend, or whatever he was, had his mouth in a tight red bow, and Sam thought about popping him one on the way out. He decided against it. He hadn’t done much to get on God’s good side, but popping a reverend felt like a step in the wrong direction.

Outside, St. Louis wore a veil of smoke. Heat shimmered off stone and brick. Sam tasted last night’s drinks in his mouth. He tasted death from the church. Susanne Hearne’s death. He walked a block, until he found a cab, and even after that short distance he was sweating all the way to his toes. He went to the Arcadia.

The Arcadia’s dining room was swarming at the lunch hour. Men and women dripped sweat and diamonds in equal measure. Busboys ran back and forth, clearing tables and freshening drinks and swapping linens. The place was dry, so Sam sat at the bar and ordered a club soda with lime, and the lime made him think of Bacardi and Susanne Hearne. Matias Kurtz wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Maybe it was his day off. Maybe he’d killed a woman and skipped town. Sam didn’t know, but he wanted to find out. He wanted to find out, and then he wanted to do something worse, but he didn’t know to whom.

When he left the Arcadia, he walked, and he regretted every step of it. Hearne’s hundred dollars was burning a hole in his wallet, but he walked because he needed the air and because he’d walked the last time, when he followed Kurtz. Mostly he walked, though, because he felt like he had one foot out over an edge, and he was wondering if he’d fall.

The tenement apartments where he’d followed Kurtz were just how he’d left them: miserable, yellow, and sucking their teeth. Sam knew the building Kurtz had entered, but he didn’t know the apartment. He took off his jacket, slung it over his shoulder, and loosened his tie. He would have mussed his hair, but it didn’t need it; his hair had a natural sympathy with mussing.

Up the stairs, into the dense foliage of cabbage-smell, the scent of soup that might have doubled as laundry water, of none-too-fresh socks on a slow braise. The summer heat made slow circles inside the brick. It was hot now. It’d be hotter later. Women sat in doorways, fanning themselves, melting into their own sweat, shouting at children. Some of them looked at him. Some of them had hungry eyes, and they weren’t hungry for cabbage. Some of them ignored him, and Sam wasn’t sure which he liked less.

One of them was pink from hair to heels, the pink of a ham cooked slow. She had black hair down to her waist—an impressive waist—and she wore a house-dress printed with tabby cats. The dress was slit halfway up her thigh. An impressive thigh.

“Yah?” she said. She had an accent. Maybe Hun. Something that came from that direction, at least.

“Matias Kurtz. He live here?”

She crossed swollen ankles. Her stool creaked. It wasn’t a warning creak; the stool looked like it had given up on warnings a long time ago.

“Police?”

“No, not police.”

“Matias is good boy.”

“Which apartment?”

She shook her head.

“Come on, which room?”

She leaned past him as a gaggle of children swooped along the corridor. “Fritz, Maria, Josef, Adolf—” and then the children were nothing more than a star-burst of blond hair and tanned limbs disappearing into the hot shadows.

“Those all yours?”

She shrugged.

“You got a husband?”

Another shrug. A tired shrug.

“Forget it.” Sam started towards the stairs at the end of the hall.

“Police,” she said.

He looked back. She held up her hand. Three fingers. Pointed up.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “All right.”

He went up. The heat was denser here, packed like wet wool. The women in their doorways were listless, sprawled against the frames. With arms and legs spread out, they could have been models posing for a painting, except for the fact that they weren’t. They were tired and hot and poor. They weren’t meant to be here, and Sam would have put each one of them on a ship if he could have, but he felt sorry for them anyway.

On the third floor, he didn’t need to ask where Matias Kurtz lived. The woman sitting in the doorway, a bucket of wash-water between her knees, was as good as a signpost. She had his face—the kind of face popes wanted to see in glass and stone—she had the same coloring, blond and tan. When she’d been sixteen, she’d been beautiful too, but now her hands were cracked and red, and her face puffy, and she looked limp: hair and shoulders and knees. Boiled once or twice with her own cabbage. She was Matias Kurtz’s mother, or Sam Turner would eat a turnip.

“Mrs. Kurtz,” Sam said. “I want to talk to you about your son.”

The water in the bucket sloshed as she scrubbed the graying bottoms of a union suit. She didn’t look up. She didn’t respond.

“Mrs. Kurtz.”

Nothing. The other women in the hall watched, but not Mrs. Kurtz.

A window, really nothing more than an opening in the brick, let in a panel of sunlight. No breeze, just more heat, rising like a tide. In the street below, a dog was barking. A truck rumbled by. He thought he’d heard children laughing when he came into the building, but he couldn’t hear it now. The sound was buried under all the brick. Buried under the empty, sweating women who were watching him. Sam wiped his face, squatted, touched her shoulder.

“Annelise,” she said into the apartment.

The girl who emerged looked eight. Nine, maybe, if she’d gone without a lot of meals. It looked like she had. She was pretty too, and she’d be beautiful too, and she’d—what? What kind of future for a German girl? A beer-making Bavarian husband in a house in Dutchtown? More likely this place: brick that gulped down the summer heat and the winter cold, and she’d spend forty years sitting in a doorway, and then that’s where she’d die.

Sam wanted a drink. He could have started with the wash-water.

“Hello,” Sam said.

Annelise looked down at bare feet. She was smiling. Her cheeks were red. “Hello,” she said. The word was barely big enough to get over the bucket. Then she leaned close to Mrs. Kurtz’s ear, speaking a flurry of German. Mrs. Kurtz replied.

“Mama wants to know why you’re here.”

“I want to talk to her about Matias. Is he your brother?”

Annelise nodded. She was still looking at her feet. She was still smiling.

Mrs. Kurtz said something.

“Mama wants to know if Matias is in trouble.”

“No,” Sam said. He gave Annelise his best smile. He felt like a dog for lying, but he smiled. “I just want to talk to him.”

Mrs. Kurtz said something, and this time Sam caught a word he understood.

“No,” he said, before Annelise could translate. “I’m not police.”

For the first time since Sam had arrived, Mrs. Kurtz looked up at him. She studied his face. She pulled the graying union suit out of the gray water. She wrung it dry. Then she stood, said one last thing to Annelise, and disappeared into the house.

“Mama says he’s a good boy,” Annelise said. She risked a glance at him, still smiling.

“Is he a good brother?”

She nodded. “He brings me apples sometimes.”

Sam had to smile. It was smile or bite right through his lip.

He brings me apples sometimes.

Sam knew what that was like. He knew what it was like to be a child and to be hungry. He knew what those apples tasted like. He still tasted them sometimes.

He dug two bits out of his pocket and gave them to Annelise. She looked like it was Christmas and like Christmas hadn’t come around in a couple of years. Then he left. He didn’t look at the drooping women in their doorways. He didn’t want to know what was in their faces.

The heat of the street was refreshing compared to the tenement. Sam paused on the steps and took a deep breath. He wanted to shake himself like a dog, but he took deep breaths instead. It didn’t help. He needed a cab. He needed away from this place.

When he stepped away from the tenement, someone grabbed him. Sam twisted, but he was too slow. He slammed into the tenement’s bricks. The world hissed like a bad radio signal. He stumbled, and then the hands were on him again, slamming him into the wall a second time.

“Hey there fella.”

The words were packed with two-day-old liverwurst and onions.

Blinking his vision clear, Sam tried to turn around. The hands held him fast, but he got a glimpse of a lanky, balding man. The man shoved him again.

“Christ,” Sam said. “What do you want?”

“Just want to talk, fella. Are you going to be smart?”

“Yeah, sure, smart as you want.”

The balding man considered this for a moment. Then he let go of Sam and stepped back.

Sam turned around. He could feel the cuts on his face, from the brick, but he ignored them for now. Right now he was thinking about the balding man’s face. It needed some rearranging.

“Hold on, fella. Before you get too hasty.” The balding man held a gun in one hand. In the other, a badge. “Detective Knepper. St. Louis Police.” He smiled, and he looked like he’d been the kind of kid who’d pulled the wings off butterflies. “Nice to meet you.”

“Most people just like to shake hands.”

The smile dropped off Knepper’s face. He gestured with the gun. He wasn’t gesturing at anything. It was the kind of gesture that was a reminder: gun, gun, gun.

“What’s your name, boy?”

“Sam. Sam Turner.”

“What’re you doing here?”

“Visiting my dear sick ma.”

“You’re pretty funny for a guy with a gun in his face.”

“I’m pretty funny all the time.”

Knepper was smiling again. “You wouldn’t happen to be looking for a boy named Kurtz, would you? You wouldn’t happen to be one of those Pinkerton types, you know, the one Hearne has sniffing around.”

Sam pressed his tongue into the gap in his teeth. He didn’t answer.

“Thought so,” Knepper said. “Well. What’d you find out?”

Sam waited a moment longer. Knepper was still smiling. He looked like he’d enjoy shooting. He looked like he’d enjoy it enough to be stupid.

“You want me to take you somewhere quiet?” Knepper asked. “Back to the station. There’s a real quiet room. You and I can have a long talk.”

“He’s not here. His mother said he’s a good kid. Another woman said the same.”

Knepper considered this. The gun still hadn’t left Sam.

“All right. Listen, you’re done. I don’t care how much Hearne is paying you. You’re off this job, understand? If not, we’ll go find that quiet room, and you and I will talk. When I’m done talking, some of my buddies will do some talking for me. Understand? And if you’ve got any dirt on you—” Knepper smiled again. Bright, sharp, like a new screwdriver he wanted to put through Sam’s eye. “Hell, sometimes those boys really let me have some fun, if you’ve got something on you.” He punctuated the sentence with the gun. “Understand?”

“Yeah, sure. Clear as crystal.”

For another moment, Knepper watched him. “Better get someone to look at those cuts. You’re going to bleed all over that suit.”

Sam didn’t answer. Knepper whistled as he walked away.