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The sight of Ruby gave me an electrical charge. She was an ember in the museum’s dimness. She was wearing her red fake fur coat thrown over her shoulders and her hair was spilling down wildly. As she stood up to throw her arms around me, I noticed that her lower half was gorgeously packed into a tight-fitting black skirt.

I held on to her until we both started to feel self-conscious. It was only then that I noticed another woman sitting there on a stool behind the dark little counter.

“This is Jane, my best friend,” Ruby said, making me think of a little kid the way she said best friend.

“Jane, this is Attila.”

Jane offered a smile. She wasn’t your femme fatale type by any stretch and she was too slender and elegantly boned to be called handsome. Her black curls were cropped close to her head and she wore no makeup. Ruby had referred to her as a natural beauty and I concurred.

Sal and Jane knew each other but there didn’t seem to be any great love going on there. As I gave Ruby details of what had happened on the track this morning—Sal of course had immediately called in a report to Ruby—Jane and Sal seemed to pointedly ignore each other. Just as I was wondering if I should tell Sal and Ruby about the mysterious knock on my door, a strange-looking man came up the stairs hauling two big laundry bags.

He frowned at the lot of us.

“Hi, Bob,” Ruby said nonchalantly. “Attila, this is my boss, Bob,” she said.

Bob shook my hand. He looked like a diabolical clown. He was bald on top and wore the rest of his hair long. He was sporting pink-tinted eyeglasses, bright green pants, and an orange sweatshirt.

“Anybody come in?” he asked Ruby.

Ruby had told me that the Coney Island Museum wasn’t exactly a thriving emporium. During winter, sometimes only three or four people came in all day and usually just to use the bathroom—for which Ruby charged them a dollar. Ruby brought in her laptop and whiled away the hours working on her notes for the book she and Bob were thinking of writing about the history of Coney Island. The only existing histories were dated and one of them was out of print. And both Bob and Ruby were passionate about their seedy home’s history.

“Two German guys from Berlin,” she told Bob now. “We did all right,” she said, opening the cash drawer and showing him a little stack of twenties, “they bought three copies of Sodom by the Sea and a shitload of mugs and T-shirts.”

“Nice,” Bob beamed at her, revealing a row of irregular but white teeth.

“I’m going to throw my wash in,” he said, picking his bags back up and heading to the front of the place. I knew he lived somewhere in the building. He’d bought the beautiful old structure fifteen years earlier for a song. He’d offered Ruby one of the empty floors, but the walls were full of holes and there was no way to sufficiently heat it, so she’d elected to stay in her own apartment.

Ruby and Jane had launched into some sort of discussion about yoga. I knew from overhearing some of Ruby’s phone conversations with her friend that these two could go on for hours about intrigue and personnel shifts in the world of New York City’s yoga centers. A world that, for all its promise of physical flexibility and spiritual equilibrium, was evidently as cutthroat and fraught with drama as horse racing.

Sal was getting restless. I had a feeling he wanted to tell Ruby his troubles, but not with the rest of us present. Eventually, he announced that he was going to go visit a friend over in Sea Gate, the strange gated community south of Coney.

“I’ll keep my phone turned on if you need me,” he told us.

Ruby and I both nodded at him. The big guy was hesitating though. His face clouded over and he shifted his weight from one leg to the other. Then he reached in his back pocket and pulled out his wallet.

“I’d feel better if you two went and stayed in a motel for a while till this crap blows over. I can give you some money.”

Ruby and I protested both the motel and the money but Sal insisted.

Eventually