We spoke the first time that night.

A phone always lives nearby, this night under my bed. It rang four times before I was conscious enough to untangle myself from the sheet and find it. 2:17 a.m. So said the red readout on my clock. He is a nocturnal animal.

“Are you Ambrose?” he asked before I could say hello.

His is a polite voice: soft, even, civil. Entirely rational. He speaks so reasonably you don’t notice at first that his questions are devoid of the normal human wellsprings, curiosity or concern. He asks questions only to decide.

“Yeah. Who’re you?” I said.

“Well, I’m . . .” He paused, as though he was actually thinking about it, and sighed. “I’m disappointed.”

“Come on,” I said. “It’s way too early to be playing games. What’s your name?”

Every answer required thought. He paused again, as though it might be tempting.

“That would be a mistake,” he said finally.

“Okay.” I had dealt with reluctant sources before. “What can I do for you?”

“She didn’t die?” he asked.

“Who?”

“The old woman.”

“You mean Lottie? Lottie Nusbaumer?”

“I believe you wrote that the children called her ‘Aunt’ Lottie.”

It was my turn to wait, to see if silence would draw him out, but he pursues his purposes singly. He had clarified. He had no need to say more until I answered.

“If you read my story,” I said finally, “you know she did not die.”

“I’m . . . I’m somewhat removed from your circulation area,” he explained. “I’m told you reported her alive.”

“Last I knew.”

“And I’m told you reported it was a wig she was wearing?”

“Yeah.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Well,” he said, after a moment. “I suppose there’s no accounting for that,” he concluded.

The hair on the back of my unshaven neck locked knees at attention.

“Do you have something you want to tell me? I asked, trying to come at it broadly.

“I’m very disappointed,” he repeated.

“Why would an old lady living through that disappoint you?”

Now he could see why I was confused.

“Oh, well,” he said, in his reasonable way. “I can’t speak to that.”

The skin on my neck tried to crawl over my eyebrows. It was not so much that he was cold as he was completely analytical. He had not called to gloat. Something had not gone according to plan. He wanted to know what it was. He was merely following up. He could have been talking about the outcome of a science experiment.

“You shot those kids and the old woman?” I said numbly, trying to think of other questions to ask him.

The pause made me think he wanted to answer me directly, but I had already learned that was his way.

“I can’t speak to that,” he said.

“Tell me your name.”

“No.”

He had already decided that question. No need for thought.

“What should I call you?”

“There’s no need. I’m hanging up now. Perhaps you tape calls.”

“No,” I shouted, then calming, “No, I don’t.”

He left me listening to the soft sizzle of an empty line.

I’d gone at it wrong. I’d asked the wrong question. A name I would’ve got eventually. Why, though. Why was question a guy like him might’ve answered, and I would’ve had a different story altogether.

The cops thought we should discuss him at length.

I made some notes about the call and stowed them in a little cache I keep under a floor board under a rug under a floor lamp in my living room. Just about where you’d expect to find them.

Being civic minded, not to mention mindful of the criminal charge for withholding evidence, I called Wood Modine. He said he’d be right over. I said no, I’d be right down. I doubted that Wood would be alone, and neither my landlord or I relish cops in my living room at 3 in the morning.

I told Wood the story. Then McConegal arrived, and I told him the story. Then Crandall came in, and I told him the story.

We were in what Wood calls the “conference room” at the jail. “Interrogation room” is too blunt for Wood. It is a windowless cell of mossy-green, glazed tile. It is furnished with a rectangular, gray-green, chipped metal table, four chairs of similar age and condition, and fluorescent lights that flicker and hum.

On the long side of the table, opposite the two-way mirror on one wall, a handcuff is bolted to the edge. I had taken a chair at one end of the table, away from the cuff. Probably cops here are gentler than Chicago cops, but there were gouges in the table under the cuff chain that were a little too deep for my tastes.

McConegal sat the other end of the table. It was very early, but he smelled of aftershave and sported his blue sport jacket and a shiny silk tie.

“You tape the call?” he asked.

“No.”

“You ever tape calls?”

I shrugged.

“Sure you do, and sometimes you don’t tell the guy on the other end you’re doing it,” McConegal said. “What d’you use? Something attached to the handset or you run the phone line through the recorder before it gets to the phone?”

“Are you trying to entrap me, Sergeant?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” he said, grinning. The grin left. “But you didn’t tape this one, jackass.”

He sounded a little disgusted, so we talked some more about how I was sound asleep when the call came in and about how it didn’t last that long and about how the guy on the other end was such a scary bastard that I didn’t think of it. I felt compelled to describe the voice yet again.

Crandall leaned against the wall in a kind of parade rest, arms bent, hands behind his back probably tucked in his waistband. He wore a pressed blue dress shirt and suspenders held up his suit pants, but he’d left his coat and tie at home.

“Where’re your notes?” he asked, looking up from the floor.

“Don’t have any.”

“Bullshit,” Crandall said.

I crossed my arms in what the editor of the paper’s Living section would no doubt call a display of defensive body language. I cocked my chin at the two-way mirror.

“You decide that after I told the story the first time or the third?”

“You said you were called at 2:17 a.m.,” Crandall said. “You said the call lasted no more than five minutes. The dispatcher says you didn’t call here until 2:53 a.m. You call anyone else?”

“No.”

“You didn’t talk to Bob Marley, for instance?”

“No.”

“You didn’t consult the paper’s goddamn lawyer about what you should do?”

“I know what I should do. I should tell you, which I’m doing. Then I should write a story about it for today’s paper. You know, I’m very offended that not one of you has suggested that I might’ve been shooing a good-looking woman out of my bed.”

Crandall ran right over that suggestion.

“And yet you’ve told us a very detailed story about this phone conversation.” His voice was rising, and in it, I could hear a hint of residual resentment from yesterday’s confrontation. “You’ve quoted a conversation to us nearly word for word. What the fuck else did you do with twenty minutes of your fucking time, if you didn’t make notes?”

As with any tantrum-prone child, a distraction seemed to be in order.

“Where is this guy if he’s not around here?” I asked.

Crandall continued to glare at me, his breathing puffy with the exertion of his little outburst and a lifetime of cigars. But McConegal passed a look to Wood, who leaned against the wall near the mirror.

“And maybe more to the point, who’s passing him information and would therefore know his whereabouts?” I said.

Crandall joined McConegal in a quick glance at Wood.

“How do you know that he’s not around here or that someone’s passing information?” McConegal asked, returning his attention to me.

“He said. He told me, ‘I’m somewhat removed from your circulation area.’ ‘I’m told that you reported that . . . ‘ He didn’t know if Aunt Lotty had died or how she survived.”

“We want to trap your line,” Crandall said, perhaps as a bit of distraction of his own.

A trap would collect the numbers used by callers to my phone. He didn’t anything about tapping the line and recording conversations, which would have been worse, but still.

“Nope,” I said. “Too many people call me for too many reasons to let cops dink with my phone.

“He’ll call again,” McConegal said. “If he does, we want to trace him.”

“Maybe he will, maybe he won’t,” I said. “The answer’s the same. No taps, no traps, no traces.”

“We could get an order,” McConegal said.

“The paper’d fight it,” I said.

“Or we could just ask the phone company for its records,” Crandall said, a satisfied smile beginning to spread across his pug face. “See what numbers you receive calls from. Now that there’s some history of this person calling you, now that you yourself have brought it to our attention, I don’t imagine the judge’d stand in the way of that.”

This was not a bed I wanted to crawl into, nor these people I wanted to sleep with. But I wasn’t seeing a lot of options.

“Only for last night. Nothing else,” I said. I’d had no other calls; it wouldn’t make any difference. “You want a waiver or some consent form, I’ll sign it, but only for last night.”

“How about a trap for future calls?” McConegal pressed.

I shrugged, trying to stay nonchalant. “If he calls, I’ll tape it. You can check the records again if something comes in.”

McConegal stood up. Crandall and Wood peeled themselves off the walls. From my seat, I said, “And just so we understand each other, I find out you sly bastards tapped me or the paper or broke this agreement in any way, here’s what I’m going to do. See, I’ve got great faith in your investigative abilities. I believe you’ll find and arrest this guy. But when you do, I’ll present myself to his attorney and tell him about how you improperly obtained the evidence that led to the arrest of his client. I’ll testify to that, and then I’ll listen to the guy’s lawyer sing that song to the judge about how all the evidence you obtained thereafter would be fruit of the poisonous tree.”

Crandall always likes a challenge.

“My,” he said, “a little knowledge of the law certainly can be dangerous in the wrong heads.” The triumphant smirk still played across his face. “I’ll bet you’ve been around here long enough,” he said, “to find your own fucking way out.”