It could change a person’s view of sex forever.

We covered the perimeter of the little rectangular space and the interior of the car in seconds and came to the same conclusion at the exact same time: The garage wasn’t Holly’s love nest.

“Okay,” Carmen said. “I’m convinced. Let’s go ruin a lot of people’s Thanksgiving supper.”

As an actress Adrienne was a little over the top. I shouldn’t have been surprised.

“Thanks for coming in to see me on Thanksgiving,” she began. “I know it’s a terrible inconvenience. The reason I needed to see you is that… I did something last week that… well… I can’t get off my mind.”

“I assumed it was important for you to have come all the way in from Denver.” I realized my role in this drama was going to be entirely ad-libbed. And with Adrienne as the person responsible for hitting the ball over the net for me to return, I knew I was going to need to stay on my toes.

“I’m having trouble living with it, with what I did. And I don’t know exactly what I should do next.”

“Yes?”

If Jim Zebid was sitting outside listening, he was-thus far-hearing a pretty convincing presentation. If he was somehow watching, however, he wouldn’t believe a word of it. When she wasn’t choking down some laughter, Adrienne was leaning over, talking into the couch pillow like Maxwell Smart with his shoe phone.

“I was doing a vasectomy on Tuesday in my Cherry Creek office-I do a thousand of them, they’re no big deal. First a little poke, a little cut, snip-snip, burn-burn-”

Burn-burn?

“-stitch-stitch.”

“Stitch-stitch” I understood just fine. I was still stuck on “burn-burn.”

“Burn-burn?” I asked. I shouldn’t have asked-it wasn’t germane to the trap I was setting-but I really wanted to know.

“Cautery,” she explained with a frown.

“Cautery,” I repeated. A rapid personal inventory didn’t reveal any pieces in that vicinity that I would be eager to have fried during the “burn-burn” segment of her operation.

Adrienne went on. “During the procedure I cut one of the guy’s nerves.”

“You cut a nerve?”

“By accident, just after the first little cut. One of my snips? My hand slipped a little.”

“Your hand slipped during a snip?”

“Are you just going to repeat everything I say? Is that all you’re planning to do? I say ‘my hand slipped,’ and you add a question mark? I could go talk into a tape recorder and just play it back and add my own question marks, save myself a lot of money.”

I glared at her. My nonverbal admonishment didn’t faze her, though; she was having a great time.

“What did he say?” I asked.

“He doesn’t know. I didn’t tell him. How the hell would he know? You think guys watch while I do vasectomies on them? There are some things a guy likes to see done to his genitals, but that isn’t one of them. You’re going to have to trust me on this.”

I almost said,“You didn’t tell him?”but thought that another repetition might be too much provocation for Adrienne to ignore. Instead, I said, “It was an important nerve?”

That question cracked her up. She took five seconds to compose herself before she was able to say “Down there? They’re all pretty important. That’s what I hear, anyway.”

It was my turn to swallow laughter.

“Is he going to be… impotent?”

“It’s possible.”

“Likely?”

“Maybe likely.” She rolled her eyes.

“Won’t he know you did it?”

“I’m sure he’ll suspect I had something to do with it. But it’ll be hard for him to prove. He’s had trouble raising the flag before. And he knew the risks going in.”

Raising the flag?

She ruffled a piece of paper. “You know what this is?”

I did, of course, but I said, “No.”

“His phone number. I know I should call him. That’s what I should do. That would be the right thing. To let him know what happened. But then the next thing I know I’ll be getting served some stack of incomprehensible papers by some damn bloodsucking lawyer who’ll make one little mistake seem like the assassination of King Ferdinand.”

That last line-the World War I allusion-was pure ad lib. It was definitely not in the script. Not even close. I was tempted to ask Adrienne to defend Francis Ferdinand’s posthumous promotion from archduke to king, but restraint was indicated and discretion ruled.

She leaned directly over the pillow and made a great show of ripping the paper into shreds.

“So you’ve decided not to call him?” I asked. That line was in the script.

“I’ve been staring at that number for two days. I have it memorized.” That’s when she recited the phone number in a lovely, melodic little singsong. She couldn’t have delivered the line any better if she’d rehearsed it for days.

I mimed some silent applause for her benefit.

A beeper chirped. It wasn’t mine, which was set to vibrate.

Adrienne responded to the interruption by diving at the little backpack/purse she carried and said, “Shit, that’s my pager. I have to go, sorry. You’ve been… I don’t know… ‘helpful’ isn’t exactly the right word, is it?”

I sat openmouthed.

She grabbed her things and skipped toward the door. The skipping part wasn’t in the script, either.

“Back or front?”

I was standing with Carmen beside the gate in the chain-link fence in Holly Malone’s backyard. Carmen had stopped my forward progress by placing her palm against my chest. To be more specific, her hand had come to rest on top of my left man-boob. A couple of inches below her hand my upper abdomen still ached from the angina or whatever it was. But the ache was dull, not sharp. I could live with it, I thought.

Figuratively, if not literally.

“The adults are all in the kitchen,” I said. “We should probably just knock on the back door. We’ll spook ’em a little bit, which is a good thing. And that way we don’t have to fight through the whole bushel of kids at the front of the house.” While I was speaking, I was also involuntarily sucking in my gut and tightening my chest muscles.

Carmen removed her hand from my chest. “You want the honors?”

“No, no. You go right ahead.”

She pulled back the screen door and knocked. Artie opened the door with a carving knife in his right hand and a stern expression plastered on his face, as though he suspected that he’d just discovered that one of his dressed-for-church kids had snuck outside for something sinister, like fun, and he was planning to Jack-the-Ripper the child into submission as a lesson for the surviving siblings.

Through the open door I spotted Holly’s two sisters lined up behind Artie. The other brother-in-law? Elsewhere.

Carmen said, “I’m Detective Reynoso. This is Detective Purdy. We’d like to speak with Holly Malone, please.”

“I don’t see any badges.” For a moment I thought Artie might be a lawyer but quickly decided that he had merely watched a lot of TV. I was having more than a little trouble getting past the dancing-teapots apron he was wearing and the fact that he had his hands on his hips in some semblance of indignation. With the knife at the ready, he looked a lot like an angry, aging transvestite on a day that he forgot to put on his wig.

Carmen and I both flashed our badge wallets for Artie’s benefit. All we offered was a bored, quick little flip/close. Nobody ever reads the damn things. I had forgotten mine one day in Boulder and just flipped open my regular wallet instead at someone’s house. It turned out that my driver’s license and a school picture of Simon worked just fine to get me in that door.