“She still, ah, dance?”

“No, I wouldn’t tolerate that when she was married to me.”

“Propriety,” I said.

“Whatever. But the thing I always knew was she didn’t like me. It was… she liked to fuck me, but she resented the rest of it. And man, did she have a temper. Come a point it would blow and she couldn’t control it.”

“That why you divorced?” I said.

“Nope.”

“Why’d you divorce?” I said.

“She was fucking other people,” he said. “I cut her loose.”

I nodded.

“You know where she went next?” I said.

“Nope.”

“You get married again?”

“Yep. Nice woman. I didn’t meet her here. Two daughters. Nice house in Andover,” he said.

“Your wife understand the arrangement with the strippers?” I said.

Boley grinned at me.

“Don’t ask,” he said. “Don’t tell.”

The music stopped. The kid on the pole stopped dancing and, wearing only a G-string, walked unself-consciously off the stage.

“At night the G-string goes,” Boley said. “But I ain’t wasting it in the middle of the afternoon on a couple shitkickers in down vests.”

“It’s a hard life,” I said.

“It is, and most of them are too stupid to do anything else,” he said.

“Hard for Beth,” I said.

“Hard for everybody,” Boley said. “You need to be tough if you’re gonna get anywhere.”

“And smart,” I said.

“Yeah,” Boley said. “That helps.”

“You think Beth was smart?” I said.

“She was tough, okay,” he said. “But she didn’t know much.”

“You can be smart and not know much,” I said.

He nodded and drank some Coke.

“Smartest broad I ever fucked,” he said.

And that in itself must be some kind of fame.

THIS ONE GOT Quirk’s interest. He stood with Belson and me, looking down at the body of Estelle, facedown near the edge of the Frog Pond in the Common.

“According to the contents of her purse,” Belson said, “her name is Estelle Gallagher. And she works at Pinnacle, where she is a certified physical trainer.”

“Appears to be the same Estelle,” I said.

She had been shot by someone who had apparently put the gun right up against the back of her head. She’d been shot twice. The second time probably as she lay facedown on the ground. One of the bullets had exited her face somewhere in the area of her nose, and it rendered a visual ID problematic. The three of us looked down at her in the harsh light of the crime-scene lamps. It made everything bright enough so that the crime-scene people could scoot about with cameras and tape measures and brushes and powders, and various kits containing nothing I understood. Several Boston cops, of lesser rank than Quirk, were going over the area foot by foot.

“Estelle Gallagher,” I said. “Never knew her last name.”

“Don’t look Irish,” Quirk said.

“No disgrace to it,” I said.

“Not now,” Quirk said.

He turned and walked to where a uniformed guy was standing with Gary and Beth. I followed him. Beth was holding on to Gary’s arm with both of hers. She was crying.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Quirk said.

“It’s terrible,” Beth said.

Gary looked dazed.

“Do you have any thoughts on who or why?” Quirk said.

“No,” Beth said, and cried some more.

“You, sir?” Quirk said to Gary.

He shook his head slowly.

“No one had any reason to do this to Estelle,” he said.

His voice was flat and not very loud. He looked as if Beth’s clutch on his arm was weighing him down.

“She lived with you two,” Quirk said pleasantly.

“Yes,” Beth said. “She was a friend.”

“She was my girlfriend,” Gary said in the same affectless voice. “Been my girlfriend a long time.”

Quirk didn’t say anything.

“When’s the last time you saw her?” he said. “Either of you?”

They looked at each other as if to compare notes.

“This morning,” Gary said. Beth nodded. “Before she went to the club. I was having some breakfast with her. Beth was still in, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, still sniffling. “But I heard you talking. I actually last saw her last night before I went to bed.”

Quirk nodded and looked at Belson.

“Frank,” he said. “We got a time of death yet?”

“Nope.”

“Okay, get a statement from these folks, and when the time of death is established, see if they got an alibi.”

“Alibi?” Beth said. “You think one of us would do this?”

“Course not,” Quirk said. “But it would be comforting to know you couldn’t have.”

He jerked his head at me and walked away.

When we were far enough away to talk, he said, “What’s this fucking threesome?”

“You may have nailed it,” I said.

“A fucking threesome?”

“Yeah.”

“And they all knew about each other?”

“I think so,” I said.

“I’m not sure any of the nuns at Saint Anthony’s told me about this,” he said.

“Probably not,” I said.

“First her husband, now her, ah, roommate. I was this Eisenhower guy, I’d be a little careful walking around with old Beth.”

“Or she with him,” I said.

“Or she with him,” Quirk said. “Tell me what you know.”

Which I did.

WE IN A MARRIOTT HOTEL,” Hawk said. “In Burlington fucking Massachusetts.”

We were in a new restaurant called Summer Winter.

“Susan says it’s great,” I said.

Susan smiled at him and nodded. Hawk looked around the room.

“Don’t see no brothers,” Hawk said.

“I know,” Susan said.

They grinned at each other. Sometimes they communicated on levels even I didn’t quite get. Hawk looked at me.

“What you know from the po-lice,” he said.

“Gun killed Estelle was the same as the gun that killed Jackson,” I said.

“Thing keeps getting more incestuous,” Hawk said. “Don’t it.”

“It do,” I said.

The waitress brought our drink order. She was pleasant to all of us. Though she was, perhaps, a little extra-pleasant to Hawk.

Hawk sipped from his margarita.

“Beth and Eisenhower got an alibi?” he said.

I nodded.

“They were together at some sort of fund-raiser cocktail party at The Langham Hotel,” I said. “Twenty people saw them.”

“Too bad,” Hawk said.

“You think they’re involved?” Susan said.

“Ah is just a poor simple bad guy,” Hawk said, “trying to get along. Ask the dee-tective.”

“Who else is there?” I said.

“Couldn’t it be a party or parties unknown?” Susan said.

“Sure,” I said. “But on the assumption of same gun, same shooter, they would need to be connected to both Estelle and Jackson.”

“They have alibis for both,” Susan said.

“Rock-solid,” I said. “For both.”

Susan guzzled nearly a full gram of her martini.

“Suppose,” I said, “that someone you knew was murdered yesterday evening, and the cops asked you for an alibi.”

“I washed my hair,” Susan said. “Took a bath, put on some night cream, and got in bed with Pearl and watched a movie on HBO.”

“And if they asked what movie, and could you remember the plot?”

“I could tell them that, but the movie has been running all month on my cable system,” Susan said.

“So Pearl is basically your alibi,” I said.

“Hawk?” I said.

“There be a young woman…” Hawk said.

“Of course there was,” I said.

I drank some of my short scotch and soda.

“Last night I had a couple of cocktails,” I said. “Made supper, ate it, and watched the first half of the Celtics game before I fell asleep.”

“So you don’t even have Pearl,” Susan said.

“I don’t,” I said.

“So you’re saying that people often don’t have any way to prove where they were of an evening, and these people have two ironclad alibis.”