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astride a chair with his arms folded on the high back, his chin on his arms, and watched me like an owl as he asked, over and over, how had Anne Terry died?

Chapter Nine
    Captain Gazzo talking over and over:
    ‘In my office it’s nine a.m. You’re not in my office, Dan. Why aren’t you in my office? Telling me about it?’
    In the morning light the deep furrows of Gazzo’s face are like the steel lines of a Durer engraving. No dream. Astride the chair, the owl watching me wake up, he looked like his own myth—the myth that says he never sleeps, year in and year out.
    I reached for a cigarette. ‘How’d you get here?’
    ‘You’re not the only snooper with master keys. Let’s talk about Anne Terry. Coffee? I plugged it in.’
    I nodded, he got two mugs of coffee, straddled the chair. ‘Where are the kids, we’re after the husband. Word says he’s floating around Manhattan. The sister says she knews nothing, never did. She doesn’t cry, Dan She’s your client?’
    ‘Only legally,’ I said, and told him about Marty and my vendetta on Ricardo Vega. I don’t hold out on Gazzo unless he’s in an official stance with even me. When he has to be he lets me know, and we understand each other. ‘Who gave the word on the husband?’
    ‘Local bar flies out there. The Pyramid tavern. Boone Terrell was in one Friday. Got drunker than usual. Yelled about all women being whores. He ran out of cash and credit, said he had Bowery friends to stake him. We’re looking.’
    ‘Jealous?’
    ‘Or guilty.’
    I heard it in his voice. Anne Terry had not died of natural causes, and not of suicide. I sat on the edge of the bed.
    ‘How?’ I asked. ‘No marks on her, no blood I saw.’
    ‘Abortion,’ Gazzo said.
    He has seen every way of death there is, every violence the half-sane imagination of man can think up. He says we’re all crazy, and that he’s the craziest for trying to stop us from feeding on each other’s blood. Hate, greed and insanity he knows, but he’s never learned to live with waste.
    ‘A pretty good job, the M.E. says,’ he said. ‘Not perfect, some internal bleeding and heavy pain after she got home, but she was packed right, no infection. A real Doc could have done it. She should have made it from the cutting.’
    ‘She didn’t make it.’
    ‘No,’ Gazzo said. ‘He used sodium pentothal for anesthetic. A heavy dose, not fatal, but she would have been woozy. She had pain at home, so she drank some whisky, and took some of those pills on her bed table. Prescription pills, but in one of those sample bottles the drug companies send to doctors. The M.E. thinks she was so woozy she took a double dose of the pills by mistake—took the dose twice because she forgot. The combination of pentothal, booze and pills could have killed her, but probably wouldn’t have, except she had a respiratory condition, too. She felt bad, took the pills, lay down, and just stopped breathing. Bad luck all around.’
    The sun was breaking through the morning grey now. I put out my cigarette. Bad luck? That was all?
    ‘Why you, then?’ I said. ‘A Homicide Captain?’
    ‘Yeh,’ Gazzo said. ‘We don’t much like those pills, Dan, you know? Maybe just bad luck, but those pills worry us. The bottle says take two for pain. The M.E. says she probably took six—added one for good measure, then took the dose twice by accident. There were maybe ten left in the bottle, so no suicide. The kids say no one was there, but they played outside, and that house is wide open. No, we just don’t like those pills.’
    ‘Someone might have known what they’d do to her?’
    ‘Maybe. Now tell me about Ricardo Vega, and everything.’
    I told him; especially about the rainy night, and what Anne Terry had said to Vega and to me, and what she had done. I told him about Sarah Wiggen and Ted Marshall, and about Sean McBride at Anne’s apartment.
    ‘You think what she wanted to talk to Vega about in private could have been being