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of ibuprofen next to her keyboard made sense. Her long gray-streaked hair was held back by the same barrette I’d noticed at the bat mitzvah. The style is popular among women handlers: The clump of hair above the barrette provides a convenient place to stash the comb needed for last-minute touch-ups on the dog. I didn’t say so to Claudia. Just as my mother taught me, I made no personal remarks. I’ll tell you, though, that the bright overhead lights were unkind to Claudia’s face. The skin under her eyes was bluish, and deep lines cut her mouth and chin off from the rest of her face, as if her lower jaw were hinged in the manner of a marionette’s.

    I sat. “Thank you for seeing me. I guess my request must have seemed a little strange.”

    She shrugged. Her left hand opened and closed as if she were kneading a fat lump of putty.

    The contrast with the driven volubility she’d shown at the bat mitzvah was so sharp that I felt ill at ease. I pulled a steno pad and pen out of my purse, settled into the chair as best I could, and smiled. “I wonder if you could tell me what happened.”

    She cleared her throat. “Jack was a publisher. He ran a small press. In Cambridge. Damned. Yankee Press. They did travel guides. New England guides. Books on the Alcotts, Lexington and Concord, Paul Revere. Before personal computers were, uh, fashionable, before the computer revolution hit, when it was just beginning, Jack saw the potential, especially for small presses, not only for the actual publishing but for direct marketing, mail order, all that sort of thing.” Claudia looked not at me but at her keyboard. She cleared her throat. “So at that point, he got connected with this dreadful little moon-faced man, Shaun McGrath, who was billed as some kind of computer whiz.” She transferred her gaze to me. “But what Shaun McGrath was, was a mindless technocrat! A complete philistine. He’d gone to some little business college, and . . . Jack himself was an acquisitions editor, really. His grasp of the business side of things wasn’t what it could have been. So he ended up taking in this sleazy little person! And somehow or other, McGrath talked Jack into signing a life insurance policy with himself as the beneficiary!”

    I nodded. “So that’s how you suspected—”

    “We did not suspect! We knew! Once we learned about the insurance policy, we put it together with the dog and the desk, and it was perfectly obvious. The police knew, too. Everyone did. It couldn’t have been anyone else. Everyone loved Jack. And it had to be someone who worked there.” I raised my eyebrows.

    “They’d had rats in the building.”

    When I was growing up, the local dump had rats. Remarkably enough, even after it became a sanitary landfill, it still had rats. Until a few months earlier, I’d never seen one anywhere else, unless you counted a few ailing white rats in cages in Steve’s waiting room. My own neighborhood, however, was now experiencing what The Boston Globe called a “rat invasion,” a sudden and occasionally visible proliferation apparently attributable to construction on Huron Avenue, where a new water main and gas line were being installed. In Owls Head, Maine, target-shooting rats was a socially acceptable, if gruesome, local sport. As a new Cambridge pastime, however, it had all the promise of pre-Columbian proto-soccer played with a human head. We’d been warned not to poison the rats, either. Cambridge being Cambridge, we were probably supposed to conduct an ethological study of rodent behavior in a natural urban environment.

    “Rats,” I echoed.

    Claudia nodded. “Jack foolishly decided to deal with the problem himself. He got hold of this horrible, very powerful poison. Everyone knew it was there—everyone at the press. And Shaun McGrath laced Jack’s coffee with it. He planted a couple of letters that purported to be suicide notes. But when we found the dog tied to the desk, well, that was the first