“You’re welcome,” Alan said.

They turned at Spadina and picked their way around the tourist crowds shopping the Chinese importers’ sidewalk displays of bamboo parasols and Hello Kitty slippers, past the fogged-up windows of the dim-sum restaurants and the smell of fresh pork buns. Alan bought a condensed milk and kiwi snow-cone from a sidewalk vendor and offered to treat Kurt, but he declined.

“You never know about those places,” Kurt said. “How clean is their ice, anyway? Where do they wash their utensils?”

“You dig around in dumpsters for a living,” Alan said. “Aren’t you immune to germs?”

Kurt turned at Baldwin, and Alan followed. “I don’t eat garbage, I pick it,” he said. He sounded angry.

“Hey, sorry,” Alan said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply—”

“I know you didn’t,” Kurt said, stopping in front of a dry-goods store and spooning candied ginger into a baggie. He handed it to the age-hunched matron of the shop, who dropped it on her scale and dusted her hands on her black dress. Kurt handed her a two-dollar coin and took the bag back. “I’m just touchy, okay? My last girlfriend split because she couldn’t get past it. No matter how much I showered, I was never clean enough for her.”

“Sorry,” Alan said again.

“I heard something weird about that blue house on the corner,” Kurt said. “One of my kids told me this morning, he saw something last night when he was in the park.”

Alan pulled up short, nearly colliding with a trio of cute university girls in wife-beaters pushing bundle-buggies full of newspaper-wrapped fish and bags of soft, steaming bagels. They stepped around him, lugging their groceries over the curb and back onto the sidewalk, not breaking from their discussion.

“What was it?”

Kurt gave him a sideways look. “It’s weird, okay? The kid who saw it is never all that reliable, and he likes to embellish.”

“Okay,” Alan said. The crowd was pushing around them now, trying to get past. The dry-goods lady sucked her teeth in annoyance.

“So this kid, he was smoking a joint in the park last night, really late, after the clubs shut down. He was alone, and he saw what he thought was a dog dragging a garbage bag down the steps of 

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