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saw, what you did. I don’t expect total recall.” I put a faint challenge into my voice.
    “Don’t underestimate me. I’m fucking good.” He broke into a sudden grin.
    “You from around here?”
    “East Cambridge, born and bred.”
    So we talked “Who do you know?” shit for a while. Since I grew up in Detroit, my local repertoire’s limited, but I’ve picked up a lot of Cambridge lore from living here, talking to cops and firefighters. He accepted another doughnut, which I took as a good sign.
    He remembered the fire.
    “Hell, wish I didn’t fucking remember,” he said. “Freezing to death, like these bums do in winter, that’s not so bad. You go to sleep, like, you don’t feel the pain. But burns, shit. I burned my hand once, bad, when I was a kid. Christ, I’d been an animal, I’d have chewed the fucker off. You’d think a kid going to fucking Harvard — I mean, how can you be so goddamn unhappy, you’re smart enough to get into fucking Harvard in the first place?”
    I could have told him smart didn’t mean happy, but I didn’t want to stop the flow. We’d walked as far as the Main Street cutoff by the firehouse. We sat on a bench and I offered him the doughnut box again. This time, he took chocolate. He was going to have to spend a whole day at the gym to atone.
    “You want specifics?”
    “Whatever you got,” I said.
    “Okay. It’s April third. I pulled graveyard eleven/seven, and the beef comes in early morning — I can get the exact time — after a goddamn boring shift. I’m in a car with Eddie Daley. You know Daley?”
    “No.”
    “It gets back I said he’s an old fat fart, I’ll know it came from you.”
    “It won’t come back.”
    “Well, it was up to him, we’d a missed the call. Came in as a fire, so we’re backup; the fire guys are on it. It’s dark, confusing, but things are okay. We block the street ’cause they gotta run the hose off a hydrant the other side of Mem Drive. The Harvard cops are all over it, and you know what they’re like, former fucking Green Berets, think we’re nothing but fucking trash.”
    “Uncooperative.”
    “Trained to keep that dirty laundry off the line. We go to a disturbance call at Harvard, the U cops get there first, they’re flushing dope down the johns.”
    “They get in your way?”
    “Nah. The place is just makeshift, made of wood. I remember thinking maybe bums got in, you know, find a fucking place to sleep. Light a candle, things go up. Like that warehouse fire in Worcester killed all those firefighters.”
    “You figure somebody’s inside?”
    “Nope. But the fire boys decide they better go in, case a bum got in, and by then the place is really burning and they can’t get in, except for one team, and they think somebody’s in there, but the captain calls them out ’cause the roof’s going. Turns out she made a regular — whatchacallit — funeral pyre in there, accelerants and shit.”
    “But how did you make it as a suicde?”
    “Didn’t then. Treated it as a fucking supicious death. By the fucking book.”
    “Somebody could have set the fire.”
    “You think we’re too fucking dumb to figure that? We talked to people, talked to her boyfriend. The guy’s trying to be stand-up, but he’s crying like a baby.”
    Her boyfriend
. My client told me he was out of town. “Who?” I said. “Name?”
    “Benjy? Yeah, Benjy somebody.”
    “You can look it up later.” He was giving me good stuff, slipping into present tense, reliving it instead of just reporting it. I didn’t want him to stop.
    “Somerville boy — those Harvard babes can’t stay away from the locals, ya know? Yeah, well, he fucking knew she was feeling down. She tried to break it off with him, told him she didn’t want to fucking see him anymore. We traced her final evening. Had good luck with that. She goes to the gas station on Mount Auburn, the one at Aberdeen, gives ’em a story about running out of gas, buys a couple gallons. We got