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he will mail you a check for your legal fee. Please tell me what that amount will be.”
    â€œThere’ll be no fee, Malikah. I knew Sari. It would be my honor to help answer your uncle’s questions. I’m hoping I will be able to give him some sense of closure, perhaps in a day or two.”
    In a day or two .
    Looking back, I can’t believe I actually said those words. I suppose I could have instead quoted from my favorite poem by my favorite poet, Seamus Heaney:
    History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
    Except that passage continues:
    But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme
    So instead I gave her a hug and said good-bye.

Chapter Seven
    â€œAre you shitting me?” Benny said. “You actually sent that whack-job to the cops with a Blistex tube and a broken high heel?”
    â€œHe’s Stanley Plotkin, Benny. The guy is a genius. Literally. He’s convinced she was murdered, and he claims the Blistex and the heel are evidence. I don’t understand how his mind works or how those things are evidence of anything. But I’m also not a cop. I told Jerry to take him over to the station after work and talk to the detectives who investigated her death.”
    Benny chuckled. “I can’t even imagine that scene. Like something out of a Monty Python routine.”
    We were having lunch at Whittemore House, the private faculty club at Washington University. I watched as the waitress and an assistant set down his lunch order, which included two sandwiches—crab cake on a bun, chicken salad on rye—plus a bacon-wrapped beef tenderloin and a side of French fries.
    One of Benny’s perks was a certain number of free meals with a guest each semester.
    I raised my eyebrows. “Does all of that count as just one meal?”
    â€œVery funny, Miss Quiche of the Day. Speaking of which, what the hell is that green crap in there? Parsley?”
    â€œSpinach, and it’s delicious.”
    â€œFucking quiche.” He shook his head. “Time to man up, Rachel.”
    I glanced around the dining room. With the exception of my lunch mate, the male faculty members of Washington University had apparently read the memo on how to dress like a male faculty member of Washington University. There was plenty of tweed, a fair number with suede elbow patches and, beneath those jackets, an assortment of turtlenecks and white shirts with bow ties. By contrast, Benny’s ample girth today was clothed in a New York Rangers hockey jersey, baggy army pants, and red Chuck Taylor AllStar Hi Tops. Topping off that ensemble was a shaggy Jew-fro in need of a trim. If you want to get away with so scruffy a look at Whittemore House, you better reside in the academic stratosphere with Professor Benjamin Goldberg.
    Despite his national reputation in the field of antitrust law, he remains my beloved Benny: fat, foul-mouthed, and ferociously loyal. And my best friend in the whole world. We met as junior associates in the Chicago offices of Abbott & Windsor. A few years later, we both escaped that LaSalle Street sweatshop—Benny to teach law at De Paul, me to go solo as Rachel Gold, Attorney at Law. Different reasons brought us to St. Louis. For me, it was a yearning to live closer to my mother after my father died. For Benny, it was an offer he couldn’t refuse from the Washington University Law School.
    â€œSo,” he said, “did he change their minds?”
    I shook my head. “What Stanley viewed as evidence of murder they viewed as evidence of suicide.”
    â€œSuch as?”
    â€œApparently, the two most common crimes in parking garages at night are robbery and rape. Neither happened to Sari. Her credit cards were still in her purse, along with eighty-three dollars in cash, all of which landed near her on the ground below. Her underwear was in place and there were no signs of sexual activity,