BELSON AND I sat in Belson’s car outside a Dunkin’ Donuts on Gallivan Boulevard, drinking coffee and browsing a box of assorted donuts. I preferred the plain ones. Belson liked the ones with strawberry frosting and sprinkles.

“What kind of sissy eats strawberry-frosted donuts?” I said.

“With jimmies,” Belson said.

“I had too much respect for you,” I said, “even to mention the jimmies.”

“Thanks,” Belson said. “My poetic side.”

“Um,” I said.

“You know that Jackson’s widow has moved in with your boy Goran?”

“And his girlfriend,” I said.

“What the fuck is that about?” Belson said.

“Love?” I said.

Belson looked at me as if I had just spit up.

“They did the will,” Belson said. “She is now worth eighty million, seven hundred, and twenty-three bucks.”

“More or less,” I said.

“That’s the number they gave me,” Belson said. “I assume it’s rounded to the nearest dollar.”

“Might explain why Estelle and Gary have welcomed her into their home,” I said.

“But why does she want to go?” Belson said.

“Why do most people do anything?” I said.

“Love or money, or variations on either,” Belson said.

“She don’t seem to need money,” I said.

“So we’re back to love,” Belson said.

“But you don’t like it,” I said.

“I don’t see that broad doing anything for love,” Belson said.

“You don’t like Beth?” I said.

“I think she killed her husband,” Belson said.

“Not herself,” I said.

“No, but there’s people who’ll do anything you need if you have money.”

“She didn’t have it until her husband died,” I said.

“So maybe she got a trusting hit guy,” Belson said.

“Like who?” I said.

Belson shrugged.

“Don’t know any trusting hit guys,” he said.

We were quiet. Belson ate the last strawberry-frosted.

“Love and money,” he said.

“Or sex and money,” I said.

“Same thing,” Belson said.

“You think they took it out in trade?” I said.

“It’s what she’s got,” Belson said.

“And it’s gotten her this far,” I said.

“So it’s a theory,” Belson said.

He found a chocolate-cream donut under a cinnamon one, and took it out from under and dusted off the accidental cinnamon and took a careful bite. The donut had a squishy filling, and Belson was very neat.

“She know anybody would kill somebody?” Belson said.

“Her husband did,” I said. “She probably met some. She knew Boo and Zel.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Belson said.

“Doesn’t explain why she’s living with Gary and Estelle,” I said.

“Nope,” Belson said.

I located the cinnamon donut that Belson had put aside in favor of chocolate cream. We ate silently for a moment.

“We don’t have any idea what we’re doing,” I said.

“No,” Belson said. “We don’t seem to.”

I OPENED THE BPD FOLDER on Beth. She had been born Elizabeth Boudreau in a shabby little town on the Merrimack River, east of Proctor. She was thirty-six. In the month she graduated from Tarbridge High School, she married a guy name Boley LaBonte, and divorced him a year later.

Nobody was paying me to do anything. On the other hand, no one was paying me to do nothing, either. Business was slow. I was nosy. And I had kind of a bad feeling about this long-running mess I’d wandered into and hadn’t done a hell of a lot to improve. So I got my car from the alley where I had a deal with the meter maids, and headed north from Boston on a very nice February day with the temperature above freezing and stuff melting gently.

You enter Tarbridge on a two-lane highway from the south. The town is basically three unpainted cinder-block buildings and a red light. A few clapboard houses, some with paint, dwindle away from the cinder block. Up a hill past the red light, maybe a half-mile away, stood a regal-looking redbrick high school. The fact that Tarbridge had a municipal identity was stretching it a bit. That it had a high school was jaw-dropping. It had to be a regional school. But why they had located a regional high school in Tarbridge could only have to do with available land, or, of course, graft.

The town clerk was a fat woman with a red face and a tight perm. She had her offices in a trailer attached to one of the cinder-block buildings. The plastic nameplate on her desk said she was Mrs. Estevia Root.

I handed her my card, and she studied it through some pink-rimmed glasses with rhinestones on them, which hung around her neck on what appeared to be a cut-down shoelace.

“What do ya wanna see Mrs. Boudreau for?” the clerk said.

“I’m investigating a case,” I said. “In Boston.”

“Boston?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What the hell are you doing up here?”

“Just background stuff,” I said. “Where would I find Mrs. Boudreau.”

“Probably in her kitchen, where she usually is.”

“And where is the kitchen located?”

“Back of the house,” Estevia said.

I nodded happily.

“And the house?” I said.

“Passed it on the way in, if you come from Boston,” Estevia said. “’Bout a hundred yards back, be on your right heading out. Kinda run-down, looks empty, but she’ll be in there.”

I felt a chill. If Estevia thought it looked run-down…

“Did you happen to know her daughter?” I said. “Beth?”

“She run off long time ago, and no loss,” Estevia said.

“No loss?”

“Best she was gone, ’fore she dragged half the kids in town down with her.”

“Bad girl?” I said.

Estevia’s mouth became a thin, hard line. Her round face seemed to plane into angles.

“Yes,” she said.

“Bad how?” I said.

“Just bad,” Estevia said.

It was all I was going to get from Estevia.

“Thank you for your time,” I said.

IT WAS A very small house. It not only looked empty, it looked like it should be empty. There wasn’t enough paint left on the front to indicate what color it might once have been. The roof-line was bowed. The windows were closed and dirty. Something that might once have been curtains hung in tattered disarray in the windows.

I parked and went to the front door. There was no path shoveled. The uncut weeds of summer, now long dead, stuck up through the diminishing snow. There was no doorknob, and the hole where there had been one was plugged with a rag. I knocked. No one answered. I pushed on the door. It didn’t move. I’m not sure it was locked; it was more likely just warped shut.

I went around to the side of the house and found what might be a kitchen door. There was a screen door and an inner door. The screening had torn loose and was curled up along one side. The inner door had a glass window that was so grimy, I couldn’t see through it. I knocked.

From inside somebody croaked, “Go ’way.”

It didn’t sound welcoming, but I figured the somebody didn’t really mean it, so I opened the inside door and stepped in. She looked like a huge sack of soiled laundry, slouched inertly at the kitchen table, drinking Pastene port wine from a small jelly glass with cartoon pictures on it. The table was covered with linoleum whose color and design were long since lost. There were pots and dishes in the soapstone sink, piles of newspapers and magazines in various corners. A small television with rabbit ears was playing jaggedly. The scripted conviviality and canned laughter was eerie in the desperate room. A black iron stove stood against the far wall, and the room reeked of kerosene and heat.

“Mrs. Boudreau?” I said.

“Go ’way,” she croaked again.