CHAPTER : 12It was half-past nine before Fish found the Azores on Thames Street. He’d passed it several times, but the Portuguese funeral parlor on the corner, its window full of flyspecked tinsel trappings of gaudy death, threw him off, and he didn’t look up ta see the neon sign with the flowing purple arrow pointing to “Rooms, Day or Week,” around in the weed-grown dead end, littered with shells, that extended to the jetty between two piers, where the fishermen were swabbing out their empty boats. He turned his car in. The building was a long starkly barren clapboard-sided former warehouse, built on barnacled piles over the water. The rickety porch had another neon sign over it, and three women on it, like bundles of old laundry dumped in rocking chairs, waiting to be picked up.
“Does M
