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with delicate bones who always seemed to be shrinking inside his beautifully tailored suits, his neck overcome by a high collar and the big knot of a silver tie. His black hair, waving back intricately from a straight line across his forehead, was his best feature, but it looked artificial. He had large, glistening, mahogany-colored eyes almost entirely without whites, a nothing nose, and the thickest pair of lips that Quincy had ever seen on a white man, very red against a complexion that ranged from saffron to orange depending upon the intensity of his emotions. Although Quincy knew that the man was several months younger than he, there was something about him that always made Quincy think of an old man in a room in a hospital, waiting.
    “Did you Hear me? I said your receipts are off six percent this week.”
    Quincy unbuttoned his jacket. Rooms that contained Patsy Orr were always uncomfortably warm. “That’s because five-twenty-seven came up,” he said. “Five plus two equals lucky seven. Every brother with a rabbit’s foot in his pocket plays it. Lydell and me was up till two this morning paying out.”
    “They were off four percent last week and eight percent the week before that.”
    “Hard times. It’s like the market, only opposite. Next time the Supreme Court hands down a desegregation decision, you watch them numbers climb, Patsy.”
    “Mr. Orr,” someone corrected.
    The someone, reading a paperback book in a tan stuffed leather armchair by the door, was called Sweets, and he was the only white man who unnerved Quincy as much as Patsy Orr. He was bullet-shaped like Devlin, but stretched out, a .44 long as opposed to a squat magnum round, with a head that came to a perfect point. It was the point that bothered Quincy; he found it impossible not to stare. The condition must have been congenital, as he could think of no mishap that would plane a man’s head on all four sides. Colorless hair grew straight down from the point and curled on Sweets’s forehead, which sloped without a crease to glass-blue eyes and a brief Irish nose and a long upper lip split in the middle like a cat’s. His suit was monk’s-brown and sack-shaped—a dead giveaway that he was carrying—and he wore one of those short diamond-shaped ties Quincy hadn’t seen since the forties, red and blue in vertical halves with a musical clef embroidered on it, red on the blue background, blue on the red. Quincy craned his neck a little to see the paperback’s cover. The Warren Commission Report.
    “Times must be especially hard in your neighborhood,” Orr said. “Nobody else’s receipts are off by as much as yours.”
    “Hey, what else is new? Hastings Street ain’t Grosse fucking Pointe.”
    “Mr. Orr don’t like that kind of language.” Sweets turned a page.
    “How long have you known Lafayette?” Orr asked.
    “Lydell? We was in school together. They threw us out at the same time. You’re skinning the wrong frog there, Mr. Orr.” He tried the smile.
    “Your judgment of human nature hasn’t impressed me in the past.” The small man removed his hands from the desk. They left no patches of moisture on the shiny top as Quincy’s would have; as any man’s would have who had blood in his veins instead of engine coolant. Quincy thought that if someone poked him full of holes with an icepick, the holes would bleed for a second and then stop, just like the radiator in the Zerex commercial. “I’m sending you a man next week,” Orr went on. “He’s what we call a doctor. He’ll look at your organization and suggest changes.”
    “That ain’t necessary, Mr. Orr.”
    “I wasn’t asking your opinion.”
    “Well, is he black or white?”
    “His name’s Gallante. Will you make him welcome?”
    Another fucking dago. “I got a choice?”
    “Everyone has a choice, Springfield.”
    Four hundred fifty feet down, a horn squonked in the street.
    “Anything else?” Quincy asked.
    “Not just now.” Orr went on looking at