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“No. But from now on don’t take work out of the office, okay?”

She nodded and that was enough.

13.

Aja was gone by 6:30. I dressed and was ready for the night by 7:00.

The last talk I had with my daughter had put the trouble with Monica to bed, but I forgot, as most men are wont to do, that what happens to me is not necessarily up to me.

Upon exiting the door onto Montague Street I heard a man shout, “Oliver!”

The street was crowded with shoppers beginning to think about dinner and Christmas and who felt that they should be outside before the bite of winter sent them home for the season.

A group of young men and women, mostly black, were fooling around near the curb. From around the twenty-something revelers came Coleman Tesserat, Monica’s boy-toy husband. He was dressed for jogging with the hood down. The sweat suit was yellow with dark blue or black piping.

I had a short-nosed .45 revolver in my windbreaker pocket, but that hardly seemed necessary. Later that night things might be different.

“Coleman,” I said.

A sky-blue-haired black girl watched us. She heard the threat, as I had, in Coleman’s voice.

“What did you say to Monica?” he demanded.

“Why you wanna ask me that and you already know?”

Coleman got to within twenty-four inches of me. He was a black belt in some Eastern exercise system and thought that taught him how to defend himself.

“I asked you a question,” he said with all the confidence of the dead.

I said, “You already know.”

The blue-haired girl touched a young man’s shoulder.

“I’m not afraid of you,” Coleman was saying.

“If that was true,” I said, still looking at the girl, “you wouldn’t be in my face.”

“I could kick your ass right here,” Coleman warned.

“In front of witnesses?” I said innocently. “And me with my hands at my side.”

“Stay out of my business,” he said, understanding that he’d made a tactical error confronting me like that.

“Did your wife tell you why I said I’d look into you?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“She called a man I was investigating. If he was of another nature I might be dead. She was fucking with me for no reason. I just pushed back. And the next time you come at me, be ready to kill, because I won’t stop coming till it’s over.”

I walked away with all kinds of nonsense racing through my body and mind.

Teenage hormones sang in my heart and sinews because I wanted to beat Monica’s new husband to pulp. Under that feeling was the revelation that my preoccupation with the opposite sex had returned. I knew this when I saw Blue-hair looking at me.

I was ready.

There’s an illegal private club on Avenue D down near Houston. It takes up the three-level subbasement of a huge public housing project.

You push the button for apartment 1A and the buzzer lets you in. You come to the door and say a name. If they like the name, you go through the door and down some stairs, coming to another door. This opens to a very large room that is quiet and usually half-filled with men and women who need privacy on the level of a secret society. There are comfortable chairs and tables, walls lined with bookshelves, and servers wearing either tuxedos or miniskirts.