It hadn’t taken long for William Fitzgerald’s leatherette book to fill again with the names and the sins of the powerful and the wealthy. Although he wasn’t well-known — being unpleasant and aggressively, unremarkably ugly — he was reliable, and poised in the useful borderland between respectable and cheap. Rumour, vague and unspecific, bruited him about, and his clients found him. He worked for wifebeaters, for philanderers, for panderers and seducers, for dopers and killers and whores, running their errands and bullying their marks and remembering, and remembering. This was his only indispensable strength.

The best time for him was in the summer. The sun and the humidity pulled all the poison to the surface like the pus in an abscess stirring at the touch of a hot compress. At those times William Fitzgerald moved through the city as a plowsman does through a field of ripe ears, tasting and picking and plucking. He respected no Sabbaths in the hot months. He discovered and then recovered two murders (for a fee), found the house of a young man who subsequently disappeared, tracked innumerable spouses to identical motels by the freeway, took pictures, bugged phones, lifted evidence. He was in his element.

Despite his flaws William Fitzgerald was neither stupid nor unworldly. He knew people with a clarity that sickened him, and he knew Fate only slightly less well. He had a grudging respect for the haughty manipulations of a God in which he didn’t — quite — disbelieve, suspecting on some lower level that they, Fate and William Fitzgerald, had similar senses of humour, similar appreciations of humanity.

So he recognized trouble when it came looking for him. Like most trouble for detectives, trouble came in the form of a lissome young woman, as curvacious and scenic in her way as the bay that sparkled distantly outside of his window. She was cold and composed; she had been crying. William Fitzgerald disliked her intensely when he laid eyes on her.

Wouldn’t he help her, she asked, plaintively.

William Fitzgerald weighed her in his mind, found her wanting. He would not help her, no.

She looked shocked. She had no one else to turn to! Her family was gone (she anticipated a question he hadn’t intended to ask): her brother abducted, her father killed. She didn’t have much money, but… She blushed and looked down, her gamine charms on prominent display.

She could keep her money, as far as William Fitzgerald was concerned. He didn’t want it. She looked up at him hopefully. Then… He wanted nothing to do with her. She looked shocked again, but he didn’t care. He shooed her from his office. She was crying as he pushed her through the door, sobbing as she walked down the hall. He cracked the door when she was at the top of the stairs. Her eyes were quite dry as she went down, though her sobs continued. He nodded, approving, and went back inside.

The man sitting in front of his desk was a shapeless mass of wet paper and bad teeth. His badge, which William Fitzgerald assumed was forged, sat neatly squared to the edge of the blotter. The man’s eyes were mouse-grey, dove-grey, with pupils so small as to be nonexistent. He wanted William Fitzgerald’s services, he explained; specifically he wanted William Fitzgerald’s services in gathering a little, how to say, extralegal evidence against a crime boss.

The wet paper globbered at him, in fake comraderie. He was a clever man, the crime boss, clever and wily and dangerous. Too clever to leave evidence around where it could find him, too clever to draw his crimes into his home. Too clever for a family. Too clever for the safety of the citizens, for the safety of the city. He needed to be stopped.

How did he, William Fitzgerald, fit into all this, William Fitzgerald wanted to know.

It was simple, the man explained. He had here (he pulled a fat manila envelope from inside his wet paper coat) ‘evidence’; things that, if found within the house of the crime boss, would send him to jail for a long, long time.

William Fitzgerald’s back stiffened. He did not change his customary slouch, but there was a tension running through him.

And, said William Fitzgerald, and waited.

And also in the envelope was three thousand dollars, said the man. Faceless. Nonsequential. Untraceable. Nonincriminating.

William Fitzgerald looked at him and his loathing for the wet paper man was clear in his eyes. He had his scruples, he said, low and evenly, and he had his limits. Investigation, extortion, blackmail, ruination were fine and good but honestly. He did not fabricate the venality of humanity, and he would thank the wet paper man to leave.

The wet paper man gave a horrible scream and turned himself inside out. From his fluttery remains poured out winged black things in the millions, a dense cloud of activity and toothy gnashing. The scream continued, and then the things were gone. His office smelled like burning garbage. William Fitzgerald cut open the manila envelope. Inside were mouldering leaves, and the smell of the forest.

Beautiful women did not please William Fitzgerald. He resented as a hindrance to his work their awareness of their bodies, their expectation of regard. When you expect people to be looking at you, you notice most powerfully when someone does not look at you, and from long habit William Fitzgerald did not look at people. Lovely women remembered William Fitzgerald, not as a person, but as a type, and this was most especially damning, because he was a singular type.

But beautiful women were his bread and butter, married as trophies to rich and flaccid husbands, vast and insipid bores. Sooner or later, he knew, everyone falls: into boredom, into despair, into drug use, into alcoholism, into infidelity, into his sphere.

He had been hired by a man more rich than sensible to keep his particular beautiful woman satisfied. She was a doper, the lovely flesh of her arms pricked and dimpled with tiny, hair-white scars, and it was William Fitzgerald’s job to purchase and deliver the drug that she preferred. He made his deliveries in the midmorning, when the sun had risen above the buildings and the rooftop gardens, openly, phlegmatically. He watched over her as she wound the cord about her bicep, watched the injection, his nostrils slightly flared. Afterward, he removed the traces, wiped the drool from her mouth, and departed for another week.

He had been out of sorts ever since he killed a man whose face he never saw in a house he couldn’t remember. It wasn’t the death that bothered him — the blood on his hands and the guilt that went with it had been washed cleanly away into the cracked porcelain sink of his new office three weeks ago, and he had washed the red ring from the bowl with the same dispassion he used rinsing the dinner plate after a particularly rare steak. But the questions gnawed at him in novel ways, and the anger he had carried for years against humanity as a whole without ever finding a particular target had centered around the intangible men or women who had invaded his home and carried him hostage to that ugly, leaking house with nails covering the walls, and then carried him away from the warm body with the hammer, back to his house, back to his city.

That they knew about him, more than he knew about them, was not to be borne.

His little leatherette book had burned in the fire that destroyed his old office building, burned in the little space behind the picture of the angel, and with it the names and sins of nearly a hundred influential or well-to-do citizens. The loss of income was slightly annoying, but he remembered enough names — without the accompanying concrete details necessary for blackmail — to twist a few knives. He felt better after calling a judge, a city alderwoman, and the governor’s husband. More names would come to him, more crimes and peccadillos; he had faith in humanity.

A new building, a new desk, a new leatherette book, blank and expectant; the same thick, syrupy coffee, the same Midwestern scotch in the same plastic bottles. He was a creature of habit, like the swallows, like the Canadas goose, like the hibernal bear.