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He seemed to talk for an eternity. Any minute I expected old Warwick and his party to join the onlookers.

Which in fact is what happened. He joined the scene accompanied by Ms. Rossini. “Norman … what is going on here?”

I tried to smile. “Very little, Elgin, I can assure you.”

“Elgin, can you believe it, he brought that beast in here,” Royale cried at him.

Elgin, God bless him, laughed. “Oh, Royale, and why not?” He turned back to me. “And these ladies … Are they in your party as well?”

“Yeah,” said Kareena, checking him out. “We were in the bar.”

Elgin laughed again. “Norman, you old dog …” Then nodded, as though to signal I owed him one as he took Royale and led her away.

Officer Matt finally came back to us. “All right, you guys, it would be best if you got out of here.”

With great relief and with a thank-you all around over my shoulder, we exited. Not far off, I could see one of those television vans lurching into view. “This way,” I signed to my companions, who, I suddenly realized, were either in a fairly inebriated state or too far into their blind act to relinquish it.

We headed for the busy part of the waterfront and a place where I could find a cab. At one point we had to duck into an alleyway to get out of sight from a second television van. We nearly tripped over a homeless man drowsing on a cot of cardboard.

“Please, no,” he said at the sight of Alphus. “Please, God, no.”

We finally hailed a taxi. When the cabbie, a hulking, T-shirted man with a shaved skull and a ring in his ear, saw Alphus, he got out of the driver’s seat and came around to the curb. “Sorry, dudes, but that thing ain’t getting into my cab.”

“He’s quite harmless,” I said with as much dignity as I could muster under the circumstances. “He’s a Seeing Eye chimpanzee.”

“I don’t care if he plays quarterback for the Patriots, he ain’t getting in my cab.”

The driver of another cab we managed to hail proved a bit more reasonable. “It’s an extra ten for the monkey,” he said. “And if he shits, you’re cleaning it up.”

I turned to the girls. “Keep the doggie bags. And here …” I handed them some bills. As they protested, I got into the backseat and closed the door. “Drive,” I said.

Alphus nudged me. He signed, “I’m still hungry.”

“Where to?” the cabby asked.

“The nearest McDonald’s,” I said, trembling with relief.

15

It seems I have dodged any adverse publicity following our escapade at The Edge. The Bugle ran a small, confused item on page three mostly lifted from the police log. It referred to a disturbance involving a large animal at a Clipper Wharf restaurant. Needless to say I was relieved that nobody used one of those ubiquitous little phone cameras to take a picture that would have ended up plastered everywhere.

I put in a call to Lieutenant Tracy to thank him for his help in extricating me from what could have been a veritable debacle. Being out on bail, I am vulnerable to more than embarrassment. He told me he was in the neighborhood and wanted to drop by. I said of course.

He had scarcely sat down after warmly shaking my hand when, brushing aside my repeated appreciation of his intervention, insisted that it was he who was indebted to me for helping him on the Sterl case. “The chief is very pleased. He’s been on the line to the DA daily to get the charge against you dropped. But Jason Duff doesn’t like to let go once he gets his teeth into a case.”

Pausing to change conversational gears, he said, “I’m still wondering if those fake coins have anything to do with the von Grümh case.”

I nodded, but not in agreement. “You mean in terms of a motive.”

“Exactly. Von Grümh could have known something. He could have been murdered to keep him quiet.”

“I suppose that’s possible. But who?”

“I’d like to know how Max Shofar fits into von Grümh’s coin collecting.”

I shrugged with my hands. “Everything. Heinie got a lot of his coins through Max.”

“Maybe von Grümh found out that Shofar was passing him counterfeits. Von Grümh confronts him, threatens to expose him. Shofar, in a panic,