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cops nor my investigator ever found a scintilla of evidence that she was a pushover when it came to guys, or that she might be susceptible to a sweet talker who would con her out of her life savings. On the contrary: She was all business. When queried about her love life, the people who dealt with her drew a total blank. Huh? Wha’? “Bobette” and “sex” did not seem to belong in a single sentence.
    This was her life: She managed her holdings—which included her own modest but pretty two-story colonial on a sixty-by-one-hundred-foot plot in Merrick. Each Tuesday she visited the Mane Event salon and got her hair washed and set in a style Patricia Nixon favored in the 1956 campaign; once a month, she had it cut and colored. Every single Saturday afternoon she went to the movies and, afterward, stopped at Mario’s for a salad and an order of linguine and clam sauce, which she took home with her. She attended mass at St. Agnes Cathedral in Rockville Centre every Sunday morning at ten-thirty. The local libraries or video rental stores had no record of her.
    Her parents were dead. She had one brother, in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a mechanic at a Honda dealership. She had no enemies. She had no friends.
    I cleared my throat and asked the cop: “What makes you think Bobette’s dealings with Norman Torkelson were anything other than business?”
    Since he had successfully ignored me for the last five minutes, I knew Sergeant Samuel Franklin would not enjoy a reminder that he and I were standing within two feet of each other. Sam sucked in his already sunken cheeks. A second later, he took in a mouthful of air and blew up the lower half of his face. Ergo, he could then make a revolting noise at me as heexhaled and yet, technically, be not guilty of making fart sounds at a lawyer.
    Sam was the archetype for all those smug “Think Thin!” pieces that have plagued me since adolescence, the articles that advise you to mimic the behavior of the congenitally lean. “Do natural-born skinnies just lounge around? No, no and no again. They’re
always
in action! So get going!”
    Sam never stopped moving. So skinny that you could test your recollection of tenth-grade biology by trying to name each protruding bone on his skeletal frame, Sam burned calories as easily as I stored them. Besides keeping his face in constant motion, he was always tapping his feet, cracking his knuckles, twisting his torso, stretching and flexing his arms. This time he added head swiveling, checking out the acoustical ceiling tile, the floor, the doors along the hallway of the D.A.’s Office. It went beyond his usual hyperkinetics; much of this movement was to avoid looking at me.
    “Don’t the cops investigate homicides anymore?” I asked, using my courtroom voice so he couldn’t pretend not to hear me. Sam, my former friend, drummed his twiglike fingers on the file folder he was clutching; his skin had grown so dry that pale cracks crisscrossed his knuckles. “Come on, Sam.” He kept trying to ignore me. Unfortunately, he was successful. “What’s going on here?” I persisted. “You dust for prints, run them through the computer, come up with some guy who happens to have a criminal record. So you say, ‘Oh, goody, let’s charge this Norman Torkelson with murder. That way, we can all take the weekend off.’”
    “We’re supposed to wait for Ms. Nuñez to discuss this,” Sam said to the dangling frosted globe of a municipal lighting fixture, thus managing to respond to my protest without fully acknowledging my presence. The absent Holly Nuñez was the newest assistant district attorney in the Homicide unit.
    “We’ve been waiting for twenty minutes! She made a ten-thirty appointment.”
    “The secretary said she was in the ladies room,” Sam explained to the lighting fixture.
    “I’ll go find her.”
    “I wouldn’t.”
    “Why not?”
    No answer. The fingers on his left hand were pulling at his pants leg, trying to get it to fall