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exchange that they paid Lorraine no attention as she drove past.
    The following morning, Decker was already brewing coffee and collecting the leaves the ficus trees seemed to shed every night when Tiger bounded in, almost knocking him off his feet.
    ‘I’ve got all the newspapers. Mrs Nathan was released without charge last night. She’s front page in most of the tabloids.’
    Lorraine glanced over them. ‘Well, until I hear back from her, there’s not a lot I can do. She was very . . .’ She frowned. She’d been thinking about her meeting with Cindy Nathan since the early hours. ‘She wasn’t exactly flaky, just, I don’t know, not reacting the way she should have. I mean, she didn’t seem to understand . . .’
    ‘The trouble she’s in?’ Decker enquired, carrying Lorraine’s coffee into her office.
    ‘Yeah, I suppose so. Maybe she was in shock. They give any more details about her?’
    ‘They certainly do. It was her automatic, by the way, slug taken from Nathan’s head.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘She also inherits the house and about half of Maximedia, as his widow,’ Decker said.
    Well, she won’t if they can make a murder rap stick to her.’
    ‘Mmm, well, according to the LA Times , it looks like that’s a sort of foregone conclusion.’ He rummaged through the paper to find the rest of the leading article from page one. ‘Apparently Cindy Nathan threatened to shoot her husband last month at Morton’s restaurant. They had a big slanging match in front of a packed dining room, and they had to drag her out.’
    Lorraine sipped her coffee. She was now leafing through all the various papers, in which Decker had marked the relevant stories in green felt-tipped pen. ‘She said she never called us,’ she remarked, lighting a cigarette.
    ‘Well, that’s ridiculous. Of course she did. And we’ve got it taped.’
    ‘ You taped the call ?’
    ‘All calls. I protect you at all times, ma’am.’ He slipped his headphones on.
    ‘Play it for me, would you?’ Lorraine continued reading, glancing at the pictures of Cindy Nathan being assisted into the lawyer’s Rolls with her hands covering her face. The press had worked fast: they also had numerous glamour shots of her – she had been in a TV soap for a few weeks, but most of the photographs were sexy poses in swimsuits and lingerie. ‘Shit, she’s only twenty years old,’ Lorraine said, not that Cindy had looked older – it just surprised her that she was so young. At the bleep-bleep of the answerphone she looked up.
    Decker was searching for Cindy’s call. He eased off his headphones. ‘I fucked up, I can’t find that call.’
    ‘Jesus Christ, Decker, this is important. We need that recording. Cindy Nathan said she never made the call to the office. If Cindy didn’t make that call, somebody did, someone who knew Harry Nathan was dead – maybe because they had shot him, understand, sweetheart? That call is very important .’
    Decker was flushing bright red. ‘You spoke to Cindy on the phone and met her. Did you think it was the same voice? I mean, do you think she made the call?’
    Lorraine lifted her hands in the air. ‘I dunno . . . and I’m not wasting time thinking about it. Like I just said, let’s move on. I’m down seven hundred dollars on this fiasco.’
    Decker was dispatched to get any back issues of articles on Cindy Nathan, and Lorraine read every newspaper. Harry Nathan had been married three times and there were photographs of Kendall Nathan, his second wife, a thin, dark woman who looked to be in her late thirties, and Sonja Sorenson, the sculptress, a tall, formidably elegant woman with prematurely white hair. Lorraine clipped out the pictures and the accompanying coverage, then tossed the rest into the trash can.
    The phone rang and made her jump but she waited a moment before she picked it up. ‘Page Investigations,’ she said brightly.
    It was Decker, speaking from the car phone. ‘Hi, it’s me. Turn the TV on. It