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technicians. No matter how great—or cunning or clever or rich—Goddard is, he could not have made it all alone! Look, every serious musician can tell that only one ear—yours!—wrote every one and all of your musical pieces! Yet, because, to guard the integrity of your work, you hand picked your own music-editors, that radical scandal sheet went after your entire reputation by alleging you didn’t write your music alone! Can’t you see there had to be people who helped Goddard? And who work with him now? All you have to do is find one of them. Just one!”
    “Even if I could come across one of them, would anybody who has remained silent all this time break that silence—for me?” He shook his head.
    She was adamant. “Find one before you say no! And persuade him—or her.” She paused and waited for him to react, but when he did not, she continued. “If you say you’ll try to find him, I’ll do anything I can to help you. Anything, Patrick. I’ll pay you in cash now what you make in six months at Kreutzer’s. And I have enough money for us both to live on. It all comes from my family.”
    The prospect of living with her and of ready cash—his car needed repairs—was overpoweringly tempting.
    He got up and walked around the room. “How long have you thought about all this?” he asked.
    “About meeting you?”
    “No. About finding Goddard.”
    “For a year or so.”
    “Have you talked to anyone else about it?”
    “No.”
    “Why not”
    “I didn’t have the right connections. Until recently, I was afraid to approach you because I didn’t think I had anything to offer that would interest you.” She paused, and a sly smile spread across her lips. “I read just about all the crap written about you since you first played in public long before I was born. Then, just as I was about to give up my research on you, I came across a most revealing article. It was written years ago—but it spoke of your true inclinations, and it gave me hope that you might not be indifferent to me after all.”
    “Was it my cover profile in
The New York Times
magazine?” he asked.
    “It wasn’t.” She laughed mischievously. “It was in
Hetero
, ‘the magazine of the morally liberated’—though not exactly a moral majority publication. Have you read it?”
    “I might have at the time,” he said. “There was so much nonsense published—”
    “The article was written by one Ms. Ample Bodice,” she interrupted, “a one-armed porno star who moonlights as a reporter of the sex scene. In it, Ms. Bodice described a weekend at the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a private club in the Catskills for ‘sexual seekers,’ where she ran into Patrick Domostroy. She said you were there with a sinuous young thing who behaved like a sex slave. Throughout the weekend and the various ‘sexually imaginative’ activities that supposedly filled it, your little leather-and-lace girl kept changing from one costume into another—sometimes looking pubescent, sometimes whorish, sometimes like a coed—each costume perfect, down to the smallest detail of dress and makeup. And not once did she repeat herself.” Andrea stopped and waited for him to react. She moved and sat directly across from him, her calves crossed, her thighs spread wide, her flesh on display. She watched him calmly, as if he too were on display, with nothing hidden from her scrutiny.
    “You’ve come a long way—from composing great musicand giving sold-out concerts at Carnegie Hall to living at the Old Glory and working as a stringer at Kreutzer’s, a pinball joint that tries to pass for a nightclub! A long way! Wouldn’t you like to change all that?”
    “That ‘long way’ happens to be my life, and I don’t complain about it,” he said, wishing he could deflect Tier argument. “And don’t be so quick to knock pinball joints!” He assumed a lighter tone. “After all, Earle Henry, the man who invented the pinball machine, also invented the jukebox. And