I decided on the way to stop by the office first.

When I walked in, Sayre Rauth was gone. I sat down behind my desk to check messages (none) and discovered that the printed pages of the Excel spreadsheet were gone, too. My first thought was that Sayre had probably taken them in order to destroy them, but then I realized something I probably should’ve hit on sooner.

If Owl had taken the data from her computer in order to pressure her in some way, it wouldn’t have been enough just to copy the files. How much good was a copy, after all? Some—but the thing that would’ve made it really worth a lot as leverage was if after copying them he’d purged the originals, deleted the files from her hard drive. That way, assuming she hadn’t backed up her files, his copy would be the only copy. If she ever wanted her hands on the files again, she’d have to do whatever she was told. When you consider the risk Owl had taken by staging a break-in, you had to figure he’d have taken this extra step to ensure it had been worth it.

So now Sayre Rauth had her files again—the spreadsheet anyway, not the videos. But the spreadsheet was the key to the kingdom.

I sat and smoked another cigarette. It started my stomach working and I went into the bathroom to take a dump. But before I even sat down, I noticed I was out of toilet paper. I went into the kitchen, but I was out of paper towels as well. The best I could manage was a stack of coffee filters. I brought them with me into the bathroom and sat down to empty out.

The funny thing was…

The rising stink stunk sweetly of Sayre Rauth.

I’d ingested her, her saliva, her slick sweat, her warm and tangy effluvia. Savoring her flesh; inhaling her exhaled breaths; absorbing her through my pores. More than just the scent of her perfume was left on me and in me.

In all likelihood I’d never see her again. She’d gotten what she wanted.

Did I care? Did I ever.

I stubbed my cigarette, quickly rinsed off in the shower, then dressed to go out.

Before heading over to the Wiggle Room, there was a stop I had to make.

It was balmy outside, the air hazy as if seen through gummy eyes. The sun had dropped below the rooflines and evening was pooling in the valley of buildings, but the streetlights hadn’t come on yet. Getting dark earlier now; in three weeks, it would be autumn. But some of the thrill of summer still remained.

Though it wasn’t the weekend yet, the city was already festive. Thursday was the new Friday night, the night that native New Yorkers went out to party, a day before the out-of-towners and tourists congested the streets and the club lines.

Car horns bayed like penned-in dogs calling to each other in the night, one horn triggering off four others.

I walked down Second and turned left onto Tenth Street, then right onto First Avenue, making an Etch-a-Sketch-style diagonal line toward my destination in Alphabet City.

Walking by Coyote Ugly, I was accosted by a pint-size girl in a black leather halter top and miniskirt who was standing out front delivering a “step right up” spiel, trying to drum up business for the bar. I guess the sign declaring FREE SHOTS WITH EVERY PITCHER wasn’t getting it done. I was in a hurry, I had things to do, so I tried to slip by her quickly. But she wouldn’t be denied her fun, and I was too damn polite to just ignore her.

She yelled out to me, “Spell cop!”

“C-O-P.”

“Spell shop!”

“S-H-O-P.”

“What do you do at a green light?”

“Stop.”

“GO!” she shouted and laughed and waved me away like a traffic cop gesturing, Move it along, bub.

Only it made me stop after a few strides and think about just how easily I’d been fooled. Some glitch in my brain, I guess. I wondered what other blind spots I wasn’t seeing.

The streetlamps flickered to life as I crossed the avenue and turned down Ninth toward Tompkins Square Park.

The road, black during day, was now lit stark orange by the city lights, and the surrounding buildings were darker silhouettes, looming shadows of various sizes.

I walked around the park instead of going through it. On Seventh Street, I passed three old Latin gentleman on the sidewalk seated on lawn chairs in front of a color TV attached to a power cord coming out of a ground floor window. They were watching the baseball game, Yankees at Tampa Bay. The cheerful announcer rattled off the balls and strikes of a behind-in-the-count batter. “One away.”

Somebody’s air conditioner dripped water on me and I jumped like it was death’s own bony finger tapping me on the shoulder.

At Avenue B, I turned right and headed down to Fourth Street and the townhouse where I’d first spoken to Sayre Rauth.

All the windows were dark. I went through the gate and up the steps to ring the bell. I waited, but got no answer. When I looked to the left, the brass plate was missing from beside the door. No more Rauth Reality, or Realty, or whatever it had been. Gone now, and I guessed so was she. I wasn’t completely surprised.

I left, went back to Avenue B, walked down to Houston Street and across it. A fire engine rolled by, its speakers blaring the War song, “Low Rider.” I walked by Katz’s Deli and turned right onto Ludlow, down past Stanton, until I came to Rivington Street. The Wiggle Room was on the southeast corner.

The afterparty was a private affair with a burly neck-less doorman keeping out the general public. It was a good thing I’d remembered to bring the invite along. I flashed it and he let me pass.

Inside there were more people than had attended the actual screening. The bar was to the right. I made straight for it, but had to wait ten minutes before the bartender took my order. And then there was an uncomfortable moment when I tried to pay for my 7&7 with a 50 Euro note. It was the only cash I had. Fortunately, a German guy at the other end of the bar agreed to change it for me, handing me two twenties and pocketing the difference. Danke schön.

I was about to start making my way through the crowd, to the rear of the bar, in search of Ethan Ore, when, all smiles, he walked through the front door arm in arm with Moyena. I kept my back to him and watched him in the bar mirror until he was just behind me. I turned.

“It’s time for our talk,” I said.

It took him a second to place me, but as soon as he did the smile melted from his face.

“Oh. Yes, but…wait here. I have to…I’ll be right back.”

“Don’t be long.”

I waited, sipping my drink—it tasted faintly of dish-washing liquid—and listened to the bar chatter.

A tall skinny white guy with a wispy chin beard like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo was talking a mile a minute at a well-dressed Asian man who looked half-asleep.

“A million people fucked-up! Why? Cuz there’s no meaning to their lives! Why? Corporations have bled the taste out of life! Why? So they can sell you things that’ll bring it back! Like the antidote to the poison they’re poisoning us with! But they’ll never cure you. Why? Cuz there’s more money in treating the illness than curing it! Why?”

I stopped listening, I already knew the answer.

I downed the rest of my drink and was thinking about going out to have a smoke when Ethan Ore finally reappeared.

“Sorry about that.”

“You might be,” I said, “after you hear what I’ve got to say.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your wife’s in a lot of trouble, Mr. Ore.”

“She’s not my wife. We’re separated.”

I didn’t argue the point.

“When was the last time you spoke to her?”

He thought for a long moment and didn’t meet my eyes.

Finally he said, “She called me this afternoon, about three o’clock.”

“You know she’s back in the city?”

He nodded.

I asked, “Is Law Addison with her?”

“What? Why would he be with her?”

“They ran off together, didn’t they?”

He didn’t answer the question. I got tired of waiting.

“There’re people looking for her who think she did. But frankly, I’m beginning to wonder.”

“Wonder what?”

“Do you know where your wife is right now?”

He shook his head.

“Where was she when you spoke to her?”

“She wouldn’t tell me. Do you know?”

“Yeh, I do,” I said, amazed—not for the first time—by how many lies you sometimes have to tell to get to the truth.

“Where is she?”

I said, “We’ll come back to that later. Maybe. If I tell anybody, it should probably be the cops.”

“Why would—” He stopped himself, looked side to side, then, lowering his voice, asked, “Why would the police want to know? What has she done this time?”

“There’s a good chance she’s going to be arrested in connection with the death of Craig Wales. She provided him with the drug that killed him. She might even be charged with murder.”

“No. It wasn’t her fault.”

“How do you know that?”

“She told me. She said someone tried to kill her by giving her bad drugs. Too strong or something. Only it was Craig who shot up first and it killed him.”

“Who does she think is trying to kill her?”

“Law Addison, who else?”

“Why?”

“He must’ve found out she—”

The bartender came over, a big bear of a man with a black Rasputin beard streaked by gray. He saw my empty glass, none in front of Ore, and asked, “Another? And how ’bout you?”

Ore ordered a vodka tonic and I had another 7&7. It was weaker than the first. Ore downed three-quarters of his drink in two swallows.

I prodded him on, “Must’ve found out what?”

“That she had…double-crossed him.”

“How?”

“Well, she didn’t go off with him the way they planned.”

“So you know she never really ran off with Law Addison?”

“I know now. I didn’t at first. I mean…I really thought she had gone with him. That’s what the police told me, it’s what the press kept reporting. What did I know? We hadn’t been living together since the end of last year.”

“So when did you find out the truth?”

“Not until, like, the end of July. I got a call from this rehab clinic up in Ithaca, telling me Michael was a patient there, asking me to come up. It wasn’t until I visited her that she told me the truth herself, that everyone had it all wrong. She’d never run away with Addison. All that time she’d been at this hospital getting herself cleaned out. She wanted us to get back together.”

He shook his head and finished off his drink, then started chewing the ice.

“Did she tell you why she didn’t go with Addison?”

He nodded.

“Someone talked her out of it. She’d been on her way to meet him. They were going to drive to some place in Pennsylvania where he’d set up a fake identity or something. He was packing up his car. She was waiting for her dealer to drop off a load of drugs. But instead of her dealer, this other guy showed up.”

“Who?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe the same guy Coy told me showed up at the Peer Group offices this morning. He knew all about her, all about Law’s plans to skip out, and he told her how they didn’t have a chance. That they’d only get caught and she would go to prison for aiding and abetting a fugitive. She was pretty strung out at the time and this guy offered to help her out.”

“Help her out how?”

“He told her he’d keep her out of it. He saw what bad shape she was in, she was hitting rock-bottom. He arranged to send her away for treatment, to this clinic up near Ithaca. And she went. And that’s where she’s been all this time, in rehab.”

“Why didn’t you tell the police any of this? They still think your wife’s a fugitive.”

“She begged me not to, and…and I was trying to complete my film. I couldn’t afford to be dragged into some… God! I still can’t afford to be connected with any of this. I wish she’d never come back here. I wish she’d just stayed where she was or else…” He didn’t finish the thought.

But it reminded me of his film’s final scene, the one that had seemed tacked on, in which the husband refused to co-sign his wife’s hospital release.

He gripped my arm suddenly and spun me on my bar stool.

“Look, you’re working for my wife, right? Tell her I need her to go away again. Just for a little longer until I get my film straightened out. She called me this afternoon for money. Tell her I’ll pay her anything. But I can’t afford for her to be here now. She’ll fuck everything up, I know she will. She always does.”

“I think she’s got bigger problems than that right now.”

“Please,” he said. “Tell her I still care about her. Tell her there’s a real chance we can get back together. Tell her anything! But please help me keep her away.”

From behind us, a voice said, “Keep who away? I hope you don’t mean me?”

We turned and faced Moyena. She was smiling, but had a troubled look in her eye. She placed a hand alongside Ethan Ore’s cheek.

“Ethan, are you okay? You look sick?”

“What? No, I’m fine. We’re just talking about the film.”

“Well, there are more important people you should be talking to right now. I’ve got a man from Lionsgate at the table in the back. He wants to meet you.”

Ore’s distress seemed to evaporate.

“Really? Where?”

He slipped off his stool and let Moyena lead him away. Neither one of them said a word to me in parting. For that matter, I was distracted too. My thoughts were in a jumble.

Someone put a buck in the jukebox and Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” started playing.

I felt a little like that myself. I’d been looking at things the wrong way all day. I was trying so hard to see things right that it took me a few moments to realize there was someone talking to me.

I looked to my right and faced an old man seated on the barstool next me.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

He was a stubby old guy with bulbous features and no chin. He wore black hornrim glasses, and on his head was a stiff gray pompadour. He looked vaguely familiar. He was about the age of one of my dad’s golf buddies, but I doubted it. Given the crowd, I wondered if he was a character actor, someone I might’ve seen in a commercial or soap opera on TV.

He said, “Oh, I was just asking if you were one of these creative people. A film director, maybe.”

“Me? No.”

“What do you do?”

I lied and said, “I’m a writer.”

“Oh, well, there you go, that’s creative. I thought so. What do you write?”

“A little of everything.”

“Really? What are you working on now?”

“Oh, I…don’t like to talk about it while I’m still writing it. It dissipates the energy you should put into the work when you talk too much about it beforehand.”

The old man nodded his head judiciously.

It sounded good to me, too. Hell, maybe I would try being a writer. Nahh. I was broke enough as it was.

The old man bought me another drink. While he was paying for it, his back to me as he counted out his money, a couple of guys passed by and one of them pointed his way. The guy said to his friend, “Hey Rick, isn’t that your Mr. Gower guy?”

Rick saw me looking at him and told his friend to shut up.

The name rang a bell. The bar’s cash register opened.

“Down the hatch,” the old man said, handing me my drink. We clinked our glasses.

I took a sip. It was stronger than the last one, not a 7&7, more like a 14&3.

Mr. Gower. The name echoed in my mind. Mr. Gower.

I took another sip.

Don’t hit me, Mr. Gower, that’s my bad ear.

I had it. That’s why it sounded so familiar. Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. I’ve always been good at Trivial Pursuit. It was the name of the shopkeeper George Bailey worked for as a kid, and later he appears as a disgraced wino in a bar.

I took another swallow of my too-strong drink.

Because Mr. Gower was an ex-pharmacist who Jimmy Stewart hadn’t been around to stop from mixing up a prescription with poison.

I stopped the rim of my glass against my lips and it tapped a tooth. I felt funny. And not the good kind of funny.

I was also remembering where I’d seen this old man twice before on separate occasions. The first time that morning, almost running into him in the lobby of the Bowery Plaza on my way out. The second time on Tigger’s computer monitor, “I was in the background in a photo taken by Craig Wales before he died.”

I turned to the old man and asked, “Whadyousay?”

“I said nothing.”

“Fuck.”

His face seemed to balloon out of proportion and fritter. His ears looked much too big, like tiny fetuses on either side of his head. I didn’t like looking at him, but I couldn’t stop. It was fascinating, like communing with a sentient lava lamp.

“Diden you jes…” I lost my train of thought, it had derailed and flung passengers and luggage all over the tracks.

I looked around for the conductor and instead saw the blond kid FL!P by my side.

“You don’t look so hot, dude.”

“Nigh…Thor…neither do I.”

The old man said, “We should help him get some air. Take his other arm.”

I said in Brooklynese, “Out you pixies go. Through the door or out da winda.” Shit, now what movie was that from?

They escorted me outside, but it didn’t make me feel any better. I couldn’t figure out why I was still hearing Patsy Cline singing. If I was hearing it at all. It could’ve just been inside my head like everything else.

I tried to put my feet up and rest, but I was still standing.

Somebody or somebodies huddled me into the backseat of a car.

“Wear…?”

I forgot what I’d been about to say.

Couldn’t have been very important then.

Nothing was very important then.

It gave me a chance to close my eyes and forget.

Sweet forget, how I’ve missed you.