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My grandmother likes old movies. When I visit her in the Lower Manhattan retirement home, we watch the old love stories and comedies on TCM.

“Ms. Malcolm?” I said.

“Yes?”

“I’m Detective Oliver. I have a warrant for your arrest.”

“You’re what?”

I took out the leather fold with my shield and ID. These I showed her. She looked, but I’m not sure she registered anything.

“Tremont Bendix claims you stole his car.”

“Oh.” She sighed and shook her head slightly. “Come in, Detective, come in.”

I could have grabbed her right there, put on the restraints while reciting her rights as the Supreme Court detailed them. But this was a soft arrest and the lady was feeling tender, vulnerable. Anyway, Little Exeter Barret had already connected with the captain of the Sea Frog. The shipment of heroin wouldn’t be in for a few more days.

I was a good cop. The kind of officer who had yards of patience and lost his temper only when threatened physically by some suspect. And even then I took no joy in beating him after he’d been subdued and restrained.

“Would you like some water?” Nathali Malcolm asked. “The good stuff’s all been packed away.”

The living room was filled with boxes, bulging duffel bags, and piles of books and electronic equipment, along with clusters of potted plants.

“What’s going on here?” I asked, as if reciting a line that had been written for me.

“This is what Tree calls me stealing his car.”

She was wearing a sheer and shimmery green housecoat with nothing underneath. I hadn’t paid close attention at first. When I got there I was still intent on the job.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“For the past three years he’s paid my rent and left me the Benz to use as my car,” she said. Her tan eyes had turned golden under electric light. “Then his wife threatened to divorce him and he told me to get out and bring his car back to his uptown garage.”

“I see.”

“I have to move, Detective…what’s your name again?”

“Joe.”

When Nathali smiled and shifted her shoulders, the structure of our temporary relationship changed from potential handcuffs to definite bedsheets.

Nathali was very good in bed. She knew how to kiss and that is the most important thing to me. I need to be kissed and kissed a lot. She intuited this necessity, and we spent the better part of that afternoon and way into the evening discovering new and exciting ways and places to kiss.

She was a victim. I could see that in her eyes, hear it in her deep voice. And the arrest warrant was wrong. A man leaving his car at a girlfriend’s house, a house he paid the rent on, had no expectation of her returning that automobile to his garage.

The next morning I’d make my report…and get back to the docks, where the real crime was happening.

When I opened my eyes, Monica Lars, my wife at the time, was already awake and making breakfast for her and Aja-Denise Oliver—our six-year-old daughter. I awoke to the smell of coffee and the memory of Nathali kissing my spine in a place I could not reach. I’d left her when my shift was over. I’d showered and changed at the station and got home in time for a late supper.

Drowsing for the last time in my morning bed, I took in a deep, satisfied breath; then the doorbell rang.

The bedroom of our Queens home was on the second floor, and I wasn’t due in to work until the afternoon. I was naked and very tired; anyway, Monica knew how to answer a door.

I stretched a bit, thinking how much I loved my little family and that a promotion to captain was not an impossibility once I single-handedly busted the largest heroin ring to ever exist within the borders of the greatest city on earth.

“Joe!” Monica yelled from the entrance hall, which was downstairs and all the way at the front of the house.

“What?” I bellowed.