"Maurice," he said.
"Tiernan," said Mossy.
Carrigan sat down at the counter. Stevo poured him coffee, and he didn't touch it.
"I went by the building," he said at last, to Lauren. "Stu and I went in. I saw the boiler. I saw the mattresses in my lobby." He turned the hat around in his hands. "Mrs. Sefcik, do you understand that there are two sections of that boiler cracked? That's what the state man found. Do you know he told me, in November, standing in that room, that if it ever ran dry under a hot fire and someone fed it, it could go up through the lobby floor? I paid him to come. Nobody made me." His voice was very quiet and very even, the voice of a man holding something down with both hands. "Every man and woman in that building, I sat on their bed and told them where they were going and how it would be paid for. I have run that building at a loss since 1972 because my father asked me to, and I have three daughters in college, and if Tomo Bilich had died last night on a mattress in my condemned lobby, I would have deserved everything that came after. Every bit of it. And I would never have known why."
Nobody said anything. The radiator under the front window ticked.
"Why didn't she tell me?" Carrigan said. "Thirty-seven years. Why didn't any of you tell me?"
Mossy Mahaffey pushed himself up on his elbow on the mattress.
"Because we trusted you, Tiernan," he said. "That's the whole of it. We knew you'd do right. And right would have killed Tomo dead as a doornail at Galen by Easter."
Carrigan looked at him a long time. Then he put his face down into his hand, briefly, the way a man does in church, and took it away again.