So I did.

And I’ll say this for her, she was all business, was Sheila the Realtor, and she knew how to close the deal.

“I’M SO glad you called,” she said after, as we lay in bed together while she smoked. She used her cupped left hand as an ashtray. “This was such an unexpected treat. Want a cigarette?”

“No thank you,” I said. “I’m nauseated enough already from the sex and the drinking.”

“I smoke to keep thin.”

“I throw up,” I said.

“I do that, too. So who is Chantal?”

“Excuse me?”

“The name on your tattoo. Is she your girlfriend?”

I looked down at the heart on my chest. “Not really.”

“An old girlfriend, then?”

“Something like that.”

“Not too old, since it looks fresh enough. What do you do when you tattoo a lover’s name on your chest and then you break up?”

“Look for someone with the same name.”

“Sort of limits your options.”

“Maybe that’s why I don’t get out much.”

“They can remove tattoos with lasers now. You can lose the tattoo and have a peel all at once.”

“Convenient,” I said.

“It’s important to keep your facial skin fresh. Your partner Beth made an offer on that house.”

“Are the sellers going to accept?”

“I think so. It’s lower than they want, but the place has been vacant for a while now. She’s getting a tremendous deal.”

“Yeah, what’s up with that? Why has the house been vacant for so long?”

“Ghosts,” she said.

“No, seriously.”

“I’m perfectly serious. There was a suicide there. It was about fifty years ago, but the most recent tenants complained about strange noises and creaking floorboards before they moved out in a panic. They’ve had a hard time finding a buyer since.”

“Does Beth know?”

“Not from me.”

“You didn’t tell her?”

“Beth looks lost, Victor, don’t you think?”

“She’s doing okay.”

“No she’s not. She clearly needs something in her life, and what I’ve found is that real estate fills so many gaps. I didn’t want a silly piece of nonsense to get in the way of a fabulous opportunity. She won’t find anything near as wonderful within her price range.”

“Are you always selling?”

“Oh, come on, Victor. We’re talking ghosts. And you saw the size of the kitchen.”

“With the morning light.”

“Well, some mornings. It’s there for the first few weeks of April, maybe. After that it sort of slides into the house next door.” She sat up, the sheet fell from her breasts. “This was fun, but I have a big day tomorrow, appointments lined up back-to-back, and then my fiancé is flying home from Milan.”

“Your fiancé?”

She turned to me, leaned close, brushed my cheek with her right hand. The smoke of her cigarette floated into my eye, and I started blinking it away.

“You’re sweet,” she said. “Are you sure you’re a lawyer?”

“I’m not very successful.”

“Call me again sometime.” She tossed off the rest of the sheets, kicked her long legs off the bed, and stood, stretched, headed to the bathroom. “Got to be going.”

“Going? Isn’t this your place?”

“Please. This is right on South Street. Why would anyone in her right mind live here? This condo is one of my listings. You can stay as long as you want, but please make the bed before you leave. I’m showing it tomorrow.”

“It’s sort of nice.”

She stopped, twisted around, stared at me with her cigarette held elegantly to the side of her face and a renewed interest in her eye. Was there a real connection between us after all? I found myself, against all reason, hoping so.

“If you’re serious, Victor,” she said, “I could get you a fabulous deal.”

I suppose that was it, right there, the moment when I fully realized how much trouble I really was in. I was lying in a bed that was not my own, blinking wildly still from the smoke, tearing, staring at a naked woman who was affianced to someone else, and feeling strangely deflated because all the time she was trying to close a deal. If I was capable of sleeping with a Realtor, was it possible to fall any lower?

I needed something, anything, to pull me out of this hole, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what, even when the answer was in front of me from the very start.

“Can you do me a small favor?” said Monica Adair as we drove north on I-95.

“Sure,” I said.

“This might sound a little weird, but my mom and dad worry about me so much, and you might be able to put their minds at ease.”

“Whatever I can do.”

“Great, then you’ll, like, tell them we’re dating, right?”

“Excuse me?”

“They’re afraid I’m too often alone. They’ll be so reassured to know I have a boyfriend who’s a lawyer.”

“Monica, is that a good idea?”

“I know they might not be so happy about the lawyer part, but they’ll get over it.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“You can say you met me at work.”

“At the club?”

“No, silly. They think I’m a legal secretary. And your being a lawyer and my fake job being a legal secretary, it makes perfect sense that we would have a fake relationship.”

“Should I call you Hillary, too?”

“Why would you call me Hillary?”

“To be consistent.”

“I knew a girl named Hillary, once,” said Monica. “She wasn’t a legal secretary, but she had a very nice figure. Not too smart, though. Thought Canada was a foreign country.”

“It is a foreign country.”

“That’s good, teasing me like that, just like a boyfriend would.”

“Monica, I’m not so comfortable lying to your parents.”

“Are you sure you’re a lawyer?”

“Pretty sure, though a lot of people seem to be doubting it lately. But if you’re so ashamed of your life, don’t lie about it, change it.”

“I’m not ashamed of what I do, I just have secrets. You don’t have any secrets, Victor? You tell everything about your personal affairs to your parents?”

I thought of the escapade with Sheila the night before. “Well, no.”

“There you go. Their life has been hard enough already, they don’t need to be burdened with the truth about mine. So the story is we met at the office and we’ve been dating for only a few weeks, but things are going really well.”

“What do we do together?”

“See movies, take walks. I cook you dinner. Veal parmesan.”

“Do you really?”

“No.”

“But I like veal parmesan.”

“I’ll fake-cook it.”

“Do I have a fake dog?”

“You did, but it died.”

“That’s a shame.”

“You’ll see, Victor, this is going to work out famously.”

I doubted very much that it would.

I was visiting Monica’s parents to learn what I could about the disappearance of Chantal Adair and its connection to Charlie Kalakos’s Rembrandt. That there should be a connection at all was too strange for words, but both girl and painting went missing almost thirty years ago, and each seemed to be of great concern to the family Hathaway, father and daughter. None of it made any sense, but I was not naïve enough to assume it was all a coincidence. I could no longer believe that the tattoo was evidence of a deep and abiding love found during my missing night. There was something else going on, something dark and as of yet inexplicable. But I was going to figure it out, yes I was, and when I found who the hell had induced me to tattoo the name on my chest, a price would be paid.

“And you’re sure they won’t mind talking about your sister?” I said to Monica as I parked the car in front of a small, tidy house.

“Don’t worry.”

“It must be difficult for them to discuss.”

“Not at all,” she said. “Chantal is their favorite topic of conversation.”

There are canyons of loss among us, chasms of pain hidden behind well-tended lawns and freshly painted exteriors. Drive by a seemingly innocuous house and you can feel the tug, like a deep, swirling ache reaching out to pull you in, and all you want to do is keep driving until you slide into shallower, more placid waters. These are churches of sadness and doom, where voices remain hushed and candles burn in sad remembrance. Lower your gaze, speak with soft reverence, hunch your shoulders, stifle your joy. Such was the Adair household on a narrow residential street not far from the western mouth of the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge, just a stone’s throw from where Ralph Ciulla had been murdered.