Cavanaugh sighed. “She’s God’s reminder to me that I’m not perfectible, much less perfect.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means, you’d think after twenty, thirty years, the old spell she throws would wear out.” He started to lift his glass, then put it back down carefully, as though afraid he might break it somehow, maybe squeezing it too hard. “Sometimes I still… I think I’ve been in love with her since the day I met her. And I wasn’t close to being a priest back then.”

Hardy wanted to ask, but Cavanaugh answered before he could get it out. “You don’t think I haven’t wanted to make love with her like any other man…?”

Hardy lifted his own glass and took a drink. He thought about Jane, about getting back with her, their hurried and aching coupling after the years apart. He said, “That must be very tough.”

The priest made some noise, like a laugh, but he wasn’t laughing. “They say love and hate are so close. Sometimes, I don’t know, I hate her, I hate ’em all…”

And there he was, unbidden, that old panhandler again, reaching out his hand. Hardy looked at the hand a minute, then flipped a quarter that fell into the middle of his palm.

“Yeah, I’ve been tempted to wipe out all the happiness I see there. Why should they get it all? You think that seems fair?” He stared at Hardy, not seeing him, looking inside himself. “There was a moment, God help me, when I was almost happy about it, about Eddie being dead. Let them feel what it’s like to have things go wrong, to have your love lost, the sum of your life reduced to zero. Erin thinks I’m perfect, huh?

“Not close, Dismas. Not even close. If I could feel like that, even for a second, when the boy was like my son, my only son…” He put a hand up to his face. “Going back to the Cochrans’, burying Eddie”-he shook his head again-“after feeling that, as a penance. You believe in a good God, you believe you’re doing something worthwhile, that being around someone you love, denying it, is strengthening you, making you a better priest, a better person. Your reward is in heaven, after all.” He tipped up his glass. “You go back. You keep going back. It’s like the old Augustine monks who slept in the same bed with their women every night to test their celibacy. The roots go way back. Deny, conquer, deny again, sin, conquer it again. That’s the road to salvation, right? Ain’t it a piece of cake?”

Hardy sat in the lengthening silence, sipping at his drink, shaken somewhere even through the booze. Cavanaugh was in such obvious pain he couldn’t believe he’d been blind to it before.

“Hey,” Hardy said. “Let’s quit bullshitting around and talk about something we really care about.”

Gradually, Cavanaugh’s face softened. He laughed quietly. “You’re okay, Dismas.”

“You’re not so bad yourself, Jim.”

Another pause, then Cavanaugh saying, “So how ’bout them Giants, huh?”

“Humm baby,” Hardy said.

Hardy switched on the light in his hallway, shivering slightly from driving home with the windows open in the light fog. He hadn’t worn a jacket. On the way home, really cold with the Seppuku’s top down, he’d bounced along singing a dirty country song about rodeos. A good song. Kept up his good mood.

Imagine feeling that a priest could be a regular friend of his, maybe even a close one. It was surprising, the charge Hardy got out of Cavanaugh’s company. Jim’s conversation was a soup, a stew, a goulash of politics, sports and what he called the “cheap m’s” of popular culture-music and movies-all seasoned-peppered more like it-with roughly equal parts vulgarity and poetry. Like, who else but Cavanaugh would have known off the top of his head that Linda Polk wasn’t, couldn’t have been, descended from James K. Polk, eleventh President of the United States? Because Polk had been childless.

He was also fun to hang with because you met a lot of women. Though the guy had to be close to sixty, he had three times Hardy’s hair, and all of it looked better. While they talked and drank (Cavanaugh in some baggy khakis and a loose blousy light-green thing with an open neck), three women had joked with them, butting in, leaving openings you could drive a truck through. But he’d closed the door on them all with a practiced grace that told Hardy this happened all the time.

Another reason they probably got along, he told himself, was that they still had Eddie Cochran in common. Except for Jane, it was pretty much the only thing on Hardy’s mind, and once he’d started talking, Cavanaugh had seemed as obsessed with it as Hardy was himself. It didn’t get boring-at least going over it with Jim, who still leaned toward the late Sam Polk as the murderer even after Hardy said that he’d been visible that whole night at a party his wife had thrown.

That was the bitch of the whole thing-none of the suspects could have done it unless one of them had at least one accomplice. And there was no indication of that at all.

Back in his office, undressed for bed, Hardy saw the three darts stuck on either side of the 20. About five drinks (and one double) unsteady (which he thought wasn’t very), he pulled them from the board and went back to the line in front of his desk.

He took a deep breath and held it, then let it out slowly. He shook his head once quickly, then let fly the first dart, nodded as it plocked into the 20.

“Okay,” he said.

One thing was certain-neither he nor Cavanaugh accepted Ed’s death as a suicide, although Jim’s feeling seemed to be more visceral than Hardy’s. To Hardy, even forgetting the suspects and their alibis, the facts simply didn’t support that finding. With Jim it was more an article of faith. Eddie Cochran wouldn’t have done it-not that way, not any way.

Hardy’s second dart hit the tiny slice of triple 20, a good shot by any standards. He put the last dart down on the desk. Tonight, for a change of pace, he’d quit winners.

The wooden chair was cold against the skin of his butt and back, but he forced himself down into it. There were scraps of paper on the desk-dribs and drabs of ideas he’d entertained over the last week or so, and he wanted to clear the decks for the morning. He was damned glad he hadn’t seen Moses this afternoon. He probably wouldn’t have been able to have stopped himself from bragging that the case was solved, which it pretty emphatically was not.

Suddenly the drink-and-talk-inspired euphoria faded. Hardy looked at the scraps of paper in his hand and wondered what the hell any of them meant. Fancy theories and clever words.

Absently, he reached over to his phone machine. He wanted to hear Jane’s voice again, and he didn’t think he’d erased the messages. The last thing had been Jim’s phone number. There it was, in fact, on one of the pieces of paper.

He flicked the machine.

“Thank you,” he heard. The end of Jim’s earlier message.

Then Jane’s voice again. “I’m just thinking about…”

But then he stopped listening. Something jangled deep in his brain, and the hairs on his arms and legs stood up over the chicken flesh. He switched the machine back to reverse.

“… 5081. Thank you.”

He closed his eyes, rewound again, listened. “Thank you.” He played it over in his mind, hearing it fresh.

“Son of a bitch,” he said.

He had put the police tape into the drawer down to his right. He held his breath, irrationally terrified that it wouldn’t be there anymore, but it was. He spun around on the chair and carefully placed the tape into the machine. It was short enough. “There is a body in the parking lot of the Cruz Publishing Company.” A tiny, strained pause, perhaps trying to think of something to add. Nope. Then just, “Thank you.”

Back at his desk, he lifted the phone machine and brought it over next to the tape recorder. He played the two “Thank you’s” one after the other, first one then the other, both ways.