Seven

ONCE WE EMERGED FROM THE WOMEN’S ROOM, OFFICIAL WHEELS SPUN. Servino, the man assigned to the Clausen case, asserted himself and talked with Laura, Alice and Peter in rapid succession, then repeated the process.

Susan Bertram, the policewoman, talked with Alice and Laura separately and together.

Mackenzie talked with Peter again.

I waited. Ever since I was a kid, I’d been intrigued by the two circles joined by a curve that make up the Philadelphia Police Administration Building. It almost looks like a plush resort, or multiplex stadium for games and concerts. But inside, whether or not the curved walls covered with corrugated paneling made for efficient use of space, as touted, there was a definite lack of graciousness, and you’d never confuse it with a pleasure palace. I had a choice between a hard chair squeezed between file cabinets and detectives, or a bench in the municipal court waiting room. The latter at least had a little more elbow room and a view through a dirty window of people being booked.

I found and read an ancient, tattered Sports Illustrated. I paced. I managed to feel both mentally agitated and brain dead. What did everything mean? I was no longer positive about Laura’s innocence, although more than ever I wanted it to be true so that she could get on with her life and healing.

Still, if that brief glimpse of what she’d lived through made me feel homicidal, how could I not allow her the same impulses? I was no longer positive about Alice or Peter, either.

More time passed. I thought wistfully and irrationally about how cigarettes had once helped make blank times like this bearable, serving as little measuring rods.

This would have been an eleven-cigarette wait.

Mackenzie appeared, rubbing his neck and sipping something that resembled crude oil. It was different, seeing him on the job. Once upon a time, when we met and I was a suspect, Mackenzie had been attractive, but less than endearing. Now, watching from the innocent sidelines, I realized there was something breathtakingly elemental about his methodical search for truth and justice. If I squinted, I could almost see him atop a white horse, plumed helmet, pointed lance and all.

And that’s one way women get seduced into unworkable, undefinable and mangled social lives. Not me. I blinked three times and Lancelot turned into one tired cop slouching over a Styrofoam cup.

“What a mess,” he said, sitting down beside me. “And how’d it come to be my mess, anyway? It’s not even my case.”

“I thought you all helped each other out. One for all and all for justice, or something.” I patted his free hand. “Feel flattered. Those kids trust you. And Alice trusts those kids.”

“Damn depressing,” he said. “Inconclusive. Infuriating. Any one of them could have done it. There’s motive, opportunity…”

“But do you think so? Do you really?”

“Three different versions, but not a one mentions how it was done—and we don’t know ourselves.”

“When will you?”

“It hasn’t even been forty-eight hours yet,” he said, looking stunned by my foolishness.

“Still, you told me they have all those snazzy tests, computerized equipment. They’ve had two whole days. What have they been doing?”

“Mandy, there are usually clues to tell you where to start. Marks or discoloration. You kind of know whether he was clubbed, or stabbed, or poisoned. But here…” He shook his head and slumped on the bench next to me. “Wouldn’t you think a guy like Santa, who has to go down chimneys, would wear a flameproof suit?”

Alexander Clausen must have ignited like a torch.

“Anyway,” Mackenzie said, “his skin’s…well, they have to start from zero. I mean they’ll figure it out by internal evidence, but some tests take a week or more. Plus—”

“I know. It’s the holidays.”

“Even cops deserve a personal life. You wouldn’t believe how angry some women get when we have to work nights,” he said gravely.

I sniffed; disdainfully, I hoped.

He finished his coffee. A gritty triangle of grounds stained the side of the cup. “I don’t know, I thought maybe Peter hit him with something. But we checked the fireplace poker, and it’s clean. No hair, no blood, so I just don’t know.”

I enjoyed concepts—murder, guilt, weapon—more than particulars like hair and blood. I wanted, inappropriately, to change focus. It was, after all, the season to be merry. Someone had even pinned red and silver garlands on the walls. It helped soften the sight of four furious and handcuffed teenagers being charged behind the glass partition.

To the casual observer, Mackenzie looked unaffected by everything, slumped as usual on his spine, long legs relaxed. But his normal slur had faded into an unintelligible swamp of vowel sounds. He cared. Good man.

“Ahknowkidslahn.”

He was really upset. I pulled apart the sounds. There was time, because his pace decreased as his drawl increased. What had he said? I. Know. [that?] [the?] kids [are?]…[a] kid is?… Lon? Who was Lon? Kid has long? Lawn?

“Thall ur. Feelt mah gut.”

I said it all to myself again, pushing at the words the way he did, and it finally cleared up. Not lawn, lying. The kid, Peter? was lying—and they all were. C.K. felt it in his gut. So did I, only I spoke Philadelphian and could understand me. “Three questions,” I said. “Why is he lying? What will you do with Peter? And could you either talk Northern or provide an interpreter?”

He crumpled his cup almost angrily and sat forward on the shellacked bench. “Ah talk fahn,” he said. Nonetheless, he did trim the edges of most of his words. “Can’t hold any of ’em. Mother’s completely out of it and Laura’s almost as vague. She doesn’t remember much of anything, ever. I don’t know if it’s trauma or mental problems or what. And I sure as hell don’ know why they’re all doin’ this. Why step forward to do so much lying?”

Again he made it sound like “lahn.” Soft, cushiony. So much less offensive than “lying.” It’s what he did with “crime” and “fire” as well. My twangy homegrown accent made everything sound worse.

Laura had told the policewoman and me that she had nightmare after nightmare of revenge, shapeless methods, misty punishments. But after the first fire—accidentally started with an overturned candle but then deliberately allowed to continue—flames filled her dreams, made them clear and definite, as if the candle fire had been a sign. Fire cleansed and punished. Wasn’t it what God had chosen for sinners in hell?

The night of the party, she’d asked Peter to stay in her room, as a protector. My hunch had been verified. “He cares about me,” she’d said. “We don’t…we weren’t…” Then her voice dwindled to a whisper as she approached the topic of her father. “He loved parties, people paying attention, saying he was important. And then he’d…he’d want to…later, to…keep feeling good.” She had covered her face with her hands. “He said it was my fault. I made it happen. He made me dress like a baby, hide myself, because he said I was so… He said it would kill my mother if she knew what I was really like.”

Later, when she was calm again, we had asked if her father had come to her bedroom that night. Peter was asked the same question, separately. Both said he hadn’t.

“I went downstairs before he could,” Laura said. “I killed him before he could. Pushed the tree down, set it on fire.”

“Why leave your room where you were safe with Peter?” I asked.

She looked even more uncomfortable. “I heard him. I thought he was upstairs, but he wasn’t. Maybe I got afraid of his seeing Peter or…I don’t know. I just went downstairs.”

“She sleepwalks,” her mother had said in her interview. Alice Clausen gripped her purse so hard that her knuckles were prominent and white. Her hands were so elegantly tended, and so out of control, shaking with a life of their own. I imagined Alice, wealthy and passive, turning body parts over to someone for updating and maintenance checks, barely noticing what was done. “She’s sleepwalked since she was a baby. Started out in her crib but ended up asleep all over the house, and never remembered how she’d gotten there. Mixes things up.”

We sat in silence.

“Mackenzie?” I said now. “I know why they’re lying.”

He raised one eyebrow. An endearing, if skeptical, gesture.

“Laura truly believes she did it.”

“Go on.”

“So do the other two. I mean think that Laura did it, and they’re covering for her.”

“That’s how you figure it?”

“She probably was downstairs when the fire alarm went off, sleepwalking.”

“Bumped into the tree, huh?”

“Probably. After Clausen was dead, you see. And Peter found her there.”

“Mama, too?”

“I don’t know. Alice might still have been out cold. But maybe. In any case, she knew. That night, that fight at the party—she knew for sure what she’d known and denied for a long time. So later, when she realized that her husband was dead and she thought Laura probably did it, because Laura kept saying so, she confessed out of shame at her collusion, as a way of making it not so, finally making her the good mother.”

Mackenzie squeezed his crumpled coffee cup.

“And Peter has the same reasons,” I said. “Laura told him her story, and he was enraged, protective—finally to the point of defending her the only way possible, by confessing. So! Now that it’s obvious those three didn’t do it, it’s time to find the somebody else who did. Like one of the guests. What is happening with that list?”

He shook his head. “Clausen’s secretary said the PR firm handled the event. The PR firm says they advised him against the whole project, but finally found a church shelter that only admits the sober and drug free. The pastor of the church says they sent the first thirty, no names asked, no history. ‘We are all brethren,’ he says. That gives us thirty unnamed from there and thirty-five completely unknown from other sources. That’s all I know. They’re still looking, but it’s—”

“—the holidays, right?”

“Would you ease up? Anyway, it’s not my case. But if it were—I wouldn’t worry too much about that list. And what made you think that quote it’s obvious those three didn’t do it end quote?”

I had mistaken noncommittal grunts, yawns and brow raises for agreement. “I can’t believe you don’t see it,” I insisted. “It is obvious that they’re innocent!”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “That’s just it. How hard would it be to conspire to look like they didn’t conspire?”

“I don’t get it.”

“Ah’m talkin’ funny again?”

“Conspire” had indeed been aspirated mush, but that wasn’t what I meant. “It’s your logic this time.”

He spoke as if to a dunce. A Yankee dunce. Slowly, with exaggerated precision, snapping off syllables. “Any one of them could have done it alone or with the others’ help. They’re all happier with him dead. Then the next thing they’d do is confuse us all. Disagree on particulars. Never mention anything the papers haven’t said first. We’ve all seen enough TV shows where the bad guy knows too much and blurts it out. So this group’s careful. They’ll sound upset that the other one’s confessing, seem like they never talked it over together. Look like well-meaning, amateur bumblers, in fact. Confession crazies.”

“Come on!”

“Hey, it’s real smart. Look guilty, claim guilt—but be dumb, unpolished, like your claim’s an obvious lie. Knot up the force, tie up our hands. Have to let ’em go until something links ’em in a conspiracy or implicates one of ’em.”

“That’s ridiculous. Too Machiavellian—so complicated and silly!”

His eyelids lowered in disdain or boredom, I couldn’t tell. “Silly? Silly? You saying they don’t have motive, every one of them? And cause? That the urge to kill and the reason for it wasn’t running real hard in their veins? Especially Laura. My money’s on her. With a little help from the boyfriend.”

“Great. Why not just take her out and hang her, right now?”

“There are mitigating circumstances. She’ll get an easy sentence, maybe probation. Treatment. Psychiatric care. It’s not the worst. You know what they did to parricides in ancient Rome? Whipped them, sewed them in a leather sack along with a live dog, a cock, a viper and an ape, and then threw them into the sea. Things have improved.”

I had no answer. Mackenzie’s work had frayed his view of mankind, and I didn’t like what he saw out of those pale blue eyes. He seemed contaminated. On the other hand, I seemed stupid, my theory naive and as porous as cheesecloth. We sat under the tinsel, glum together. He was angry that he couldn’t prove their guilt. I was angry that he couldn’t see their innocence. The tension built without our doing one more thing. Look, Ma, no hands.

“Cheer up,” he said. “Soon you’ll be a thousand miles away in the sun forgetting all about it.”

The remark fed my growing hostility. I had been waiting for three weeks, since the moment I mentioned the trip my parents kept requesting as their Christmas gift, for him to say, very simply, “Don’t go. Let’s be together.”

He had a few days off, too. It was our first chance, or could have been, to spend a leisurely time together, to begin to know each other like normal people.

Never once did he say “Don’t go” or any variation thereof. Instead, he expressed nonstop delight at my good fortune. Florida in December, what a treat. Oranges, flamingos, sunshine, palm trees. Sometimes I hated him.

He stood up. “I’m followin’ your lead, flying south, too. Haven’t seen my folks in a long while.” He nodded, agreeing with himself that his trip was a great idea. He stretched and yawned. “So,” he said, “you might as well go.” He picked up his crushed plastic cup and raised his arm in the classic, inevitable male rite, the wastepaper toss.

Of all the arrogant, insufferable pronouncements! Freeing me—giving me permission to leave town because his wonderful self would be in New Orleans! I might as well go? “I will go, dammit!” I snapped. “I have my tickets! Or did you think I was sitting around waiting for you to offer me an alternate plan?”

My outbreak messed up his aim. He walked over and picked the cracked Styrofoam off the floor, rubbed his shoe over the wet grounds, spreading the grit over the linoleum. Then he peered at me as if I were a new and mutant form of life. “Merely meant there’s no need to stay here at the station any longer. What got you in an uproar? What tickets you talking about?”

I fumbled with my coat, hoping he couldn’t see my embarrassed blush.

“Sue Bertram’s givin’ them a ride home. All of them. They win this round.”

My face no longer felt like I had sunstroke, so I looked at him. “I’m glad,” I said. Mackenzie seemed overly impressed with his own largesse. Saint C.K., freeing the innocent. “And very surprised,” I added nastily.

“You think we’re monsters? Lack all Christmas spirit? Ready to lock them in leg irons? Sometimes you disappoint me. Anyway, what’d be the point? There’s no case. They’d be out by nightfall, and we’d look like jerks. Newspapers would love it, wouldn’t they though?”

“However you feel about their guilt or innocence—”

“Hers.”

“Laura? You insist on Laura?” He said nothing, so I finished buttoning my coat, disgusted with him.

“By the way,” he said, “Susan talked to the aunt, who’s calling the shrink so Laura can get some help. This is kind of unusual, the abuser being dead and all, so normal practice, separating the two and such, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Besides—”

“I know. I know. Holidays.”

“Well, then, everything’s taken care of.” He checked his watch. Case closed. “Any more questions?” He thought he was endearing, irresistible. Instead, he was insufferable.

I had an attack of S.S.S. The dread Sudden Stranger Syndrome. I looked at this man I’d known for months—my lover and boon companion—and deep inside, a shocked voice asked, “Who the hell is he?”

It was not a new experience. The longer I am single—and the more it happens, the longer I’m going to stay single—the more familiar S.S.S. becomes. It generally speeds the newly perceived other into the past tense.

“I do indeed have another question,” I said. “So should you. Like—who really killed Alexander Clausen?”

“Ah,” Mackenzie said. “Yay-uss. You would say that.”

Three hours later, I was back at home, dropping packages on the sofa, throat scratchy, cheeks hard with cold, sniffling and thinking of nothing except a warm bath. A hot bath. A boiling bath.

“Why,” I asked Macavity, “are all the hot tubs in California, where nobody even understands what freezing means?” The cat, who had contempt for all water, anywhere, and presumably for people who steeped themselves in the wretched stuff, yawned.

I glanced at the mail, then tossed the lot of it into the wicker basket by the phone, to be reexamined, someday. Three cards with institutional return addresses and two premature postholiday sale announcements. No more safe-sex mailings from Mom. Maybe she knew that sex wasn’t an issue I had to deal with this evening.

The day that had begun in icy radiance had long since dimmed into blustery, bone-cracking frigidity. “Too cold for snow,” a salesman had said. “Too bad. No white Christmas.” I suggested that we fake it by lining up all our frostbitten body parts.

“Who are you, Scrooge?” he’d asked—after I had paid.

I was. And not only that, but I had a Dickensian ailment now, the ague. Whatever that was, I felt it in my bones.

I wanted brandy and a hot tub, followed by a quick flight to the Tahitian beach on Mackenzie’s calendar. I wanted Mackenzie to say “Don’t go to Florida.” He could slur the words all to hell. I’d understand.

Only the brandy seemed possible. Until I remembered that somewhere in the fat little portfolio that was supposed to organize my personal and professional lives, there was still an entry on the page labeled “Domestic Errands.” “Buy brandy,” it said. However, having written it down, I then forgot about it. I wasn’t even sure where the Organizer Portfolio itself was, and my life was as rumpled as ever.

Eventually, I noticed the blinking red light of my answering machine. I still wasn’t used to the idea of being on call whether home or away, let alone used to the machine itself. First, I pressed the memo button by mistake. It recorded my irritated mumbles. Then I pushed fast forward. Finally, I found playback.

There was a worried call from Alma Leary, asking her sister’s whereabouts. I didn’t need to answer that one since Alice and Laura were long since home.

An anonymous message—“Damn machines!”—from someone even less in tune with the times than I was.

Sasha was terse. “More telephone tag,” she said. “But I’m off to Atlantic City to gamble. Spell that g-a-m-b-o-1, please. Shake loose No-Name and join me.” However, she left no number.

Another confused message from the Southlands. “This is Beatrice Pepper,” it began. “Your mother.”

Even Macavity, warming my ankles with predinner rubs, looked amused.

Beatrice Pepper continued. “I don’t like this. It’s confusing. Oh! Yes. I’m supposed to tell you the—it’s three—ah, three fourteen—no, fifteen. Saturday. But why does that matter, Amanda?” She allowed herself a histrionic sigh so I’d know how selfless she was to put up with my eccentricities, then continued. “Your sweater was corning along just fine until Daddy said the arms looked too thin and I listened to him, even though what does he know about things like that? So I redid them, and then I realized that they weren’t thin. They were right. The rest was huge. I think maybe I got it mixed up with Beth’s maternity sweater. And I wanted to give it to you next week.” A sigh as large as the sweater must be. Then her whole tone perked up. “But of course you won’t need it here, it’s so warm and sunny, so it doesn’t matter if it’s a little late. I’ll measure you when you’re here. Although the wool is getting a bit frayed, dear.”

I was amazed the wool was not yet pure lint.

“It doesn’t feel right, talking to a machine. Call me. We can’t wait to see you. Oh and—is there time left to talk more? I’ll try.” She spoke very rapidly now. “Good news—Molly, the lady across the courtyard who took ceramics with me?—her son just separated from his wife—a terrible woman—and he’ll be here the whole time you are. A podiatrist. He’s no movie star, understand, and he has a little stutter, but honestly, after a while, you hardly notice.”

I wanted brandy and all I had was vanilla extract. I wanted Tahiti and was being offered a condominium pool and a homely, stuttering foot doctor. Probably my longed-for hot tub would translate into the water heater’s exploding and flooding the basement.

“Consider this official confirmation, all right?” the next message began. No salutation, no identification. “Eight o’clock tonight at Lissabeth’s. Meet you there.”

A wrong number, alas. I’d read a profile of Lissabeth’s. Peach and jade decor and Philadelphia Renaissance cuisine. Enticing.

Mackenzie and I seldom dined. We ate out spontaneously and at his odd hours. Most of the time, we ran to South Street and brought back cheesesteaks. With fried onions. Ketchup. Oil dripping from the rolls. Or hoagies. Very Philadelphia. Very good. But not at all Lissabeth’s, where mention of the peasant excess of a Philly Steak would induce the vapors.

Maybe I should go anyway, claim the meal by right of answering-machine message.

Macavity nibbled experimentally on my ankle, reminding me that he was a hungry carnivore and domestication went only so far. I walked around the half-cabinets that demark the kitchen, performed culinary wizardry with a can opener and dropped the results into the cat dish. When I straightened back up, I saw a slip of paper on the counter and the message, “Lissabeth’s—8:00.” In my handwriting.

This wasn’t déjà vu, but what was it? Bad science fiction? Hadn’t I read this story? Seen this show? Wasn’t that Rod Serling walking out from behind the sofa?

I stared at the paper until my memory jump started and I remembered writing the restaurant’s name, twisting out of my coat while I talked on the phone. The doorbell had been ringing, Alice had been confessing and Nick-from-the-party had been offering to swap food for interview data.

So I wasn’t in the Twilight Zone, after all. In fact, I wasn’t in such bad shape. Lissabeth’s wasn’t Tahiti, but it was a lot closer and a lot more possible. And I was glad to give Nick a second glance, especially as viewed through the gaping holes in Mackenzie’s character. Saturday night was looking up.

* * *

The soup was liquid yin and yang signs separated by julienned beets. I prodded it daintily, loath to deface a work of art. I noticed that Nick also ate carefully, using his arm gingerly. “Tennis,” he said. “A friend belongs to an indoor club. We’ve been playing a lot. Unfortunately, my elbow is nearly as bad as my game.”

Modesty, I was sure. The man vibrated with energy. He’d be a whiz on the courts, a blur of action.

We exchanged histories so that I knew he was a native Philadelphian, nearing forty, divorced, no kids and “into real estate.” I got a sense of a few lucrative deals punctuating long, dry periods. He lived in South Philly in a small house he’d fixed up and was an avid cook. The combination of quirky, energetic entrepreneur, homemaker and Oxlips fiction writer had potential.

After a time, Nick returned to his task, asking me if I’d liked Alexander Clausen and what kind of person I would call him. Anything like his public image? Did I know anything about his history or background? Where had he come from? How had he gotten the money to buy his first franchise?

Since I knew nothing, it was easy enough answering. Or not answering, as the case more often was. We had already done a little dance around the subject of Laura’s personality, psychology and alleged pyromania. I was glad Nick Riley didn’t know me well enough to recognize how uncharacteristic my terseness was.

“Frankly,” he said, “it isn’t hard to read between the lines and find out there isn’t any Santa Claus. Or wasn’t.”

“Is this some kind of exposé, then?”

“I don’t know. It’ll be what it turns out to be.”

“I thought you admired him. The other night, you were so on, so enthusiastic about him.”

He shrugged. “Admired his empire, his accomplishments, not him. I didn’t know him. What about you? What did you think of him?”

“I didn’t know him enough to have an opinion.” I had become a sanctimonious hypocrite and liar. My dislike of Sandy Clausen was set in granite. I simply didn’t want to see it set in print.

The salad was a chicly arranged culinary punishment. A tart dressing coated arugula, bitter cress and a wrinkled, pursed mushroom that was either an exotic rarity or rotten.

“Have you been teaching ever since college?”

“Before I started at Philly Prep, I copyedited, tried PR, and wrote speeches for a banker, among other things. It wasn’t exactly clear career tracking.”

“Do you enjoy teaching?”

“No. I do it for the money.”

His high-wattage smile escaped the confines of his beard.

“What about you?” I said. “Are you indeed in bloom?”

“Pardon?”

“At the party—don’t you remember? Something was just about to happen, and you were so excited it was contagious. You called yourself a late bloomer, and I thought you said the blooming was imminent. As if it were about to happen right before my eyes.”

He studied his empty salad plate. Then he beamed out that smile of his. “Guess I’m still a bud. One thing about being a late bloomer, though—there’s no rush.”

The waiter deposited a dish of angel’s hair pasta in front of him.

My veal scallop was the size of an unostentatious earring. The vegetables were all baby somethings. I felt like the Jolly Green Giant committing infanticide, whomping down in one swallow a thumb-sized ear of newborn corn, a generation of toddler carrots, a fetal eggplant. A bundle of anorexic string-beans was tied with a pimento bow. There was a great deal of lovely china plate visible even before I began eating. I was still hungry when I finished.

“You should write about the places they grow these crops,” I suggested. “Dollhouse farms that might fit under this table. Tiny tractors the size of my hand.”

The lovely smile again. “Which reminds me—I already have an article to write.” He lifted a hank of angel’s hair. “Laura started that fire,” he said abruptly. “I’m positive.”

I reminded myself that his was pure speculation. So far, the papers were talking about an accident. I frowned.

“Come on,” Nick said. “Somebody told me you have a policeman friend. What’s he think?” The grin invited common sense. “I won’t quote you. What’s the statistical probability of a family’s having two major, accidental fires?”

“I don’t know about statistics. I know about Laura.”

“You’re overly emotional, subjective, about her.”

“She’s my kid—my student. Of course I care.”

“Your kid’s a pyromaniac. Now, a murderer, too.”

Mackenzie thought so. Now Nick. Everybody was going to. Even without her compulsive confessing.

I ordered dessert out of pure hunger. What arrived was a miniaturist’s dream. Three tarts, each no bigger than a fingernail, one filled to the brim with half a single grape, one stuffed with a sliver of kiwi and one straining to contain three blueberries. Nouvelle dieting.

“What made you pick Clausen for your article?” I asked. “There are so many more interesting, more important people in the city.”

Nick had a thimbleful of chocolate mousse, the bud in a sauce-painting of a flower. “I don’t think you understand how much power he was accumulating. He was on his way to owning and running the city. That’s what’s interesting, the power.”

“How’d you know about him?”

“Everybody knows about him. He made sure of that. But, a more interesting question is whether we just ate dinner or a round of tapas, or appetizers? You know, I’m a terrific cook. I should have done it myself.”

I had taken a cab to the restaurant because I couldn’t bear the idea of walking from my parking lot to my no-parking street in the freezing dark. I was going to take another cab home, but Nick drove me and, to my relief, declined my offer of coffee or drinks. I was exhausted. And hungry.

I thanked him for dinner and the evening. “That cop friend of yours,” he said. “How serious is it?”

“I have no idea.” Sometimes I actually told the truth.

“Then could I call you again?”

“That would be nice,” I said, again as honestly as I could figure.

“Great. I’ll cook for you next time.”

I was not going to give Mackenzie the key to my social life and have him let it rust. He was a difficult man with an impossible job, and I was hard pressed to remember what, aside from pure lust, had ever attracted me to him.

Once inside the house, I felt a depression I’d been ignoring drape itself over my shoulders like a heavy cape. Sorrow over Laura and her story, Alice and her miseries, Peter’s bewildering involvement, fear of what would happen to all of them, confusion as to where the truth lay, and anger or sadness over the slippery, evasive Mackenzie leaked down inside of my skull.

There was only one message on the machine. The drawl was in place, and loving. He was oblivious to my disdain, damn him.

“You all right?” he asked. “I’m worried ’bout you. I’m worried about all of them, but you understand, I have a job. But I was thinking—you’d recognize a guest list, or notes about the party in a way nobody on the force would. So would you consider—it’s not exactly the holiday spirit or a date—but I’ve talked to Servino about it, and he agrees, so all the same, would you snoop at Clausen’s with me tomorrow? Try an’ help your kid? Or will that make you angry because it could be called work on my part, even though it’s my day off? What do you say?”

I say it’s turnabouts like that that trick a woman and weaken her resolve. Make her say what the hell, I can stand his weirdness a little longer.

Make her remember what it was, aside from pure lust, that attracted her to him in the first place. Make her remember the pure lust, too, more’s the pity.