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coveted as an appropriate status symbol. And she made damn sure she got it in the settlement. She wanted it not because of what it meant to her, but because of what it meant to him. It was his idea of the sort of place a man like him ought to live, and it was her idea of getting even to take it away from him. She never regretted it.
    She had endured the marriage for eighteen months, had been divorced for six, and was still angry with herself for her astounding lack of good judgment, and—in those moments when she was being brutally honest—not a little embarrassed by having played the part of the stereotypical gullible female.

2
    T he car leaned into a long climbing curve to the right as Birley left the Southwest Freeway heading north on the West Loop. Palma tried to forget Brian. Actually, it wasn’t that easy to do, considering who they were going to see now. Art Gushing was not one of Palma’s favorite people.
    “Cush didn’t say anything except that he wanted us to come out and look at this?” she asked again.
    “That’s it.”
    “You didn’t ask what it was?”
    “I did, Carmen, but you know Cush. Hell, it was just easier to come out here and look. Big deal. I was getting tired of the office for a change. And besides, the exterminators came through there last night.”
    Okay, that made more sense. It probably hadn’t taken that much of a call to get Birley out of the office. Still, she didn’t like being summoned anywhere by Cushing. In too many ways he was uncomfortably like Brian, though she had to admit Brian was considerably more sophisticated. Cushing looked like a young Italian playboy with a lean, athletic body that of itself consumed about half his salary to feed, to exercise, to tan, to coif, to dress, and to shod. Unfortunately his taste in clothes seemed to have been influenced more by his eight years in the vice squad than by the men’s fashion magazines. His wardrobe looked as if it had been confiscated from a Cuban pimp whose cousin fenced Mexican-made knockoffs of Italian ready-to-wear. Cushing’s hair was blow-dried, but his manner was oily, and the air of illegitimacy he had picked up from sleazing on the streets had never quite worn off. He was a natural-born scam man.
    When Cushing came to homicide, Palma had to deal with his ego within the first three days, which is how long it took this cocky new guy to ask her out for a drink. She accepted, giving him the benefit of the doubt. He took her to an expensive club where they sat at the crowded bar. Two drinks down, Cushing had one hand on her upper thigh and still traveling, as he ran his finest line on her, a stale monologue that would have been transparent even to a convent novitiate. Keeping her eyes on his, she had unobtrusively dropped her free hand down between Cushing’s legs and latched on to the tender, knobbed end of his penis as if her hand had been guided by radar. She gripped it in a clinch that launched his eyebrows to his hairline and widened his eyes. Without saying a word or changing her expression, she squeezed him so fiercely she had momentary fears of inflicting permanent damage. But she didn’t let go of her eye-watering grip on his glans until he moved his hand from her thigh. Neither of them spoke as they looked at each other, disconnected. Momentarily disarmed and then suddenly furious, and probably in considerable pain, Cushing wheeled around and walked out of the bar, leaving Palma to pay for the drinks and take a cab back to the station to pick up her car.
    Cushing never mentioned the incident, never, and neither did she. And he never forgave her. Even now, after three years, Art Cushing could hardly be civil to her. Their mutual antagonism was well known to everyone in the division and was always a good subject for idle gossip, though the speculation about what had happened between them was always more lurid than the facts. No one ever knew the source of their shared animosity. Cushing’s machismo would