I WAS AT the restaurant before it opened the next day. Mama brought me the four-star edition of the Daily News. They put it out on the street by six in Chinatown. I didn't have to search through it. The headline screamed "Bizarre Murder on Sutton Place." A socialite with a WASP name was found murdered by her Wall Street husband when he came home from work around nine o'clock last night. Her name didn't mean anything to me. The newspaper account was short on facts- long on adjectives: grisly, ritualistic, satanic. Hinting at things that only come out on evil nights.
It was too early to call any of the free-lance reporters I know, but I had another solid contact in the press: a West Indian who worked the streets for one of the tabloids. Worked them hard. He'd lost his Island accent somewhere between Newark and journalism school but he was a hard-core risk-taker. He might be on the job.
I found a pay phone on the West Side. I got the reporter's answering machine. "If you know who you're calling, you know what you want to say. Do it when you hear the beep and I'll get back to you."
I heard the beep. "Leave me a message," I said into the recorder.