It was Joe Palumbo. “You’re one smart lady, Kerry.”

“I’m not so sure. What’s up?”

“You said it occurred to you to wonder if Dr. Smith ever did any work on his daughter.”

“He all but denied it, Joe. I told you that.”

“I know you did, and you also had me check on Suzanne’s background. Well, listen to this.”

With a flourish, Joe laid a tape recorder on the desk. “This is most of my call to Mr. Wayne Stevens, Suzanne Reardon’s stepfather.” He pressed the button.

As Kerry listened, she felt a new wave of confusion and conflicting emotions sweep over her. Smith’s a liar, she thought as she remembered his outrage at even the suggestion that he had performed any surgical procedure on his daughter. He’s a liar and he’s a good actor.

When the recorded conversation was finished, Palumbo smiled in anticipation. “What next, Kerry?”

“I don’t know,” she said slowly.

“You don’t know? Smith’s lying.”

“We don’t know that yet. Let’s wait for those pictures from Stevens before we get too excited. Lots of teenagers suddenly blossom after they get a good haircut and a makeover at a salon.”

Palumbo looked at her in disbelief. “Sure they do. And pigs have wings.”

Deidre Reardon had heard the discouragement in her son’s voice when she spoke to him on Sunday and Tuesday, which was why she decided on Wednesday to make the long trip by bus and train and another bus to the Trenton prison to see him.

A small woman who had passed on to her son her fiery red hair, warm blue eyes and Celtic complexion, Deidre Reardon now looked every day of her age, which would soon be seventy. Her compact body hinted of frailness, and her step had lost much of its bounce. Her health had forced her to give up her job as a saleswoman at A amp;S, and now she supplemented her social security check by doing some clerical work at the parish office.

The money she had saved during the years when Skip was doing so well and was so generous to her was gone now, most of it spent on the court costs of the unsuccessful appeals.

She arrived at the prison in midafternoon. Because it was a weekday, they could only communicate by telephone, with a window between them. From the minute Skip was brought in and she saw the look on his face, Deidre knew that the one thing she feared had happened. Skip had given up hope.

Usually when he was very discouraged, she tried to get his mind off himself with gossip about the neighborhood and the parish, the kind of gossip that someone would enjoy who was away but expected to come home soon and wanted to be kept up on events.

Today she knew such small talk was useless. “Skip, what’s the matter?” she asked.

“Mom, Geoff called last night. That prosecutor who came down to see me. She’s not going to follow up. She’s pretty much washed her hands of me. I made Geoff be honest and not snow me.”

“What was her name, Skip?” Deidre asked, trying to keep her voice matter-of-fact. She knew her son well enough to avoid offering platitudes now.

“McGrath. Kerry McGrath. Apparently, she’s going to be made a judge soon. With my luck they’ll put her on the appeals court so if ever Geoff does find another reason to file an appeal, she’ll be there to kick it out.”

“Doesn’t it take a long time for judges to be put on the appeals court?” Deidre asked.

“What does it matter? We don’t have anything but time, do we, Mom?” Then Skip told her that he had refused Beth’s call today. “Mom, Beth has to get on with her life. She never will if all her life is tied up with worrying about me.”

“Skip, Beth loves you.”

“Let her love someone else. I did, didn’t I?”

“Oh, Skip.” Deidre Reardon felt the shortness of breath that always preceded the numbness in her arm and the stabbing pain in her chest. The doctor had warned that she was going to need another bypass operation if the angioplasty next week didn’t work. She hadn’t told Skip about that yet. She wouldn’t now either.

Deidre bit back tears as she saw the hurt in her son’s eyes. He had always been such a good kid. She had never had a hint of trouble with him when he was growing up. Even as a baby, when he was tired, he hadn’t gotten crabby. One of her favorite stories about him was of the day he had toddled from the living room of the apartment into the bedroom and pulled his security blanket through the bars of the crib, wrapped himself up in it and gone to sleep on the floor under the crib.

She had left him alone in the living room while she started supper, and when she couldn’t find him, she had gone racing through the tiny apartment, shouting his name, terrified that somehow he had gotten out, maybe was lost. Deidre had that same feeling now. In a different way, Skip was getting lost.

Involuntarily she reached out her hand and touched the glass. She wanted to put her arms around him, that fine, good man who was her son. She wanted to tell him not to worry, that it would be all right, just as she had years ago when something had hurt him. Now she knew what she had to say.

“Skip, I don’t want to hear you talk like this. You can’t decide that Beth isn’t going to love you anymore, because she is. And I’m going to see that Kerry McGrath woman. There has to be a reason why she came to see you in the first place. Prosecutors don’t just drop in on convicted people. I’m going to find out why she took an interest in you, and why she’s turning her back on you now. But you’ve got to cooperate; don’t you dare let me down by talking like this.”

Their visiting time was up much too quickly. Deidre managed not to cry until after the guard had led Skip away. Then she dabbed her eyes fiercely. Her mouth set in a determined line, she stood up, waited for the stab of chest pain to pass and walked briskly out.

It feels like November, Barbara Tompkins thought as she walked the ten blocks from her office on Sixty-eighth Street and Madison Avenue to her apartment on Sixty-first and Third Avenue. She should have worn a heavier coat. But what did a few blocks of discomfort matter when she felt so good?

There wasn’t a day that she didn’t rejoice in the miracle that Dr. Smith had performed for her. It seemed impossible that less than two years ago, she had been stuck in a drudge P.R. job in Albany, assigned to getting mentions in magazines for small cosmetics clients.

Nancy Pierce had been one of the few clients she had enjoyed. Nancy always joked about being the Plain Jane with a total inferiority complex because she worked with gorgeous models. Then Nancy took an extended vacation and came back looking like a million dollars. Openly, even proudly, she told the world she had had aesthetic surgery.

“Listen,” she had said. “My sister has the face of Miss America, but she’s always fighting her weight. She says inside her there’s a thin gal trying to fight her way out. I always said to myself that inside me there was a very pretty gal trying to fight her way out. My sister went to the Golden Door. I went to Dr. Smith.”

Looking at her, at her new ease and confidence, Barbara had promised herself, “If I ever get money, HI go to that doctor too.” And then, dear old Great Aunt Betty had been gathered to her reward at age eighty-seven and left $35,000 to Barbara, with the instruction that she kick up her heels and have fun with it.

Barbara remembered that first visit to Dr. Smith. He had come into the room where she was sitting on the edge of the examining table. His manner was cold, almost frightening. “What do you want?” he had barked.

“I want to know if you can make me pretty,” Barbara had told him, somewhat tentatively. Then, gathering courage, she’d corrected herself. “Very pretty.”

Wordlessly, he had stood in front of her, turned a spotlight on her, held her chin in his hand, run his fingers over the contours of her face, probed her cheekbones and her forehead and studied her for several long minutes.