That’ll be six hundred Hail Marys, my son.

Yes, Faddah.

You’ll go blind, son.

Yes, Faddah.

Angie worked her way down through the crowd milling on the stone steps. She used the backs of her fingers to move the bangs out of her eyes, though she could have solved the problem simply by raising her head. She kept it down, though, as she approached me, fearful perhaps that I’d see something in her face that would either make my day or break my heart.

She’d cut her hair. Cut it short. All those abundant tangles of rich cocoa, streaked with auburn during late spring and summer, rope-thick tresses that had flowed to her lower back and splayed completely across her pillow and onto mine, that could take an hour to brush if she were dressing up for the night-were gone, replaced by a chin-skimming bob that dropped in sweeps over her cheekbones and ended hard at the nape of her neck.

Bubba would weep if he knew. Well, maybe not weep. Shoot someone. Her hairdresser, for starters.

“Don’t say a word about the hair,” she said when she raised her head.

“What hair?”

“Thank you.”

“No, I meant it-what hair?”

Her caramel eyes were dark pools. “Why are you here?”

“I heard the sermons rocked.”

She shifted her weight from her right foot to the left. “Ha.”

“I can’t drop by?” I said. “See an old pal?”

Her lips tightened. “We agreed after the last drop-by that the phone would do. Didn’t we?”

Her eyes filled with hurt and embarrassment and damaged pride.

The last time was winter. We’d met for coffee. Had lunch. Moved on to drinks. Like pals do. Then we were suddenly on the living room rug in her new apartment, voices hoarse, clothes back in the dining room. It had been angry, mournful, violent, exhilarating, empty sex. And after, back in the dining room, picking up our clothes and feeling the room’s winter chill suck the heat from our flesh, Angie had said, “I’m with someone.”

“Someone?” I found my thermal sweatshirt under a chair, pulled it over my head.

“Someone else. We can’t do this. This ride has to end.”

“Come back to me, then. The hell with Someone.”

Naked from the waist up and pissed off about it, she looked at me, her fingers untangling the straps of the bra she’d found on the dining room table. As a guy, I had the better deal-I could dress quicker; find my boxers, jeans, and sweatshirt, and I was good to go.

Angie, untangling that bra, looked abandoned.

“We don’t work, Patrick.”

“Sure, we do.”

On went the bra with a hard sense of finality as she snapped the straps together in back and searched the chair seats for her sweater.

“No, we don’t. We want to, but we don’t. All the little things? We’re fine. But the crucial things? We’re a mess.”

“And you and Someone?” I said, and stepped into my shoes. “You’re all hunky-dory across the board, are you?”

“Could be, Patrick. Could be.”

I watched her pull the sweater over her head, then shrug that abundant hair out of the collar.

I picked my jacket up off the floor. “If Someone’s so simpatico with you, Ange, what was what we just did in the living room?”

“A dream,” she said.

I glanced across the foyer at the rug. “Nice dream.”

“Maybe,” she said in a monotone. “But I’m up now.”

It was a late afternoon in January when I left Angie’s. The city was stripped of color. I slipped on the ice and grabbed the trunk of a black tree to steady myself. I stood with my hand on the tree for a long time. I stood and waited for something to fill me up again.

Eventually, I moved on. It was getting dark and colder and I had no gloves. I had no gloves, and the wind was picking up.

“You heard about Karen Nichols,” I said as Angie and I walked under sun-mottled trees in Bay Village.

“Who hasn’t?”

The afternoon was cloudy, marked by a humid breeze that caressed the skin, then sank into the pores like soap, and smelled of thick, sudden rain.

Angie glanced up at the thick mass of gauze and bandage over my ear. “What happened, by the way?”

“Someone hit me with a lug wrench. Nothing broken, just very badly bruised.”

“Internal bleeding?”

“There was some.” I shrugged. “They flushed it out in the emergency room.”

“Bet that was fun.”

“A ball.”

“You get beat up a lot, Patrick.”

I rolled my eyes at her, pushed the conversation away from my physical abilities or lack thereof.

“I need to know more about David Wetterau.”

“Why?”

“You referred Karen Nichols to me through him. Correct?”

“Yeah.”

“How’d you come to know him in the first place?”

“He was starting a small business. Sallis & Salk did his background checks for him and his partner.”

Sallis & Salk was the company Angie worked for now, a monster high-tech security firm that handled everything from guarding heads of state to installing and monitoring burglar alarms. Most of their operatives were ex-cops or ex-Feds, and all of them looked really good in dark suits.

Angie stopped. “Where’s your case here, Patrick?”

“There isn’t one, technically.”

“Technically.” She shook her head.

“Ange,” I said, “I have reason to believe that all the bad luck that happened to Karen in the months before she died wasn’t accidental.”

She leaned back against the banister of a wrought-iron railing fronting a brownstone. She ran a hand through her short hair, seemed to sag in the heat for a moment. In the old-world tradition of her parents, Angie always dressed up for church. Today she wore cream-colored, pleated linen pants, a white sleeveless silk blouse, and a blue linen blazer she’d removed as soon as we’d started walking.

Even with the hack job she’d done to her hair (and, okay, it wasn’t a hack job; it was actually quite attractive, if you hadn’t known her before), she still looked six or seven steps above tremendous.

She stared at me and her mouth formed a perfect oval of unasked questions.

“You’re going to tell me I’m crazy,” I said.

She shook her head slowly. “You’re a good investigator. You wouldn’t make something like this up.”

“Thanks,” I said softly. It was a bigger relief than I’d expected to have at least one person not question the sanity of my investigation.

We started walking again. Bay Village is in the South End and is often derisively called Gay Village by the homophobes and family-values crowd because of the predominance of same-sex couples in the neighborhood. Angie had moved here last autumn, a few weeks after she’d left my apartment. It was about three miles from my Dorchester neighborhood, but it might as well have been on the far side of Pluto. A close-knit few blocks of bowfront chocolate brownstones and red cobblestone, Bay Village is planted firmly between Columbus Avenue and the Mass Pike. As the rest of the South End becomes ever trendier-the galleries and mochaccino houses and L.A. deco bars sprouting like ragweed, and the residents who salvaged the whole area from urban decay during the seventies and eighties getting pushed out by transplants looking to buy low now and sell high next month-Bay Village seems the last remnant of bygone days when everyone knew each other. True to its reputation, most of the people we passed were gay or lesbian couples, at least two-thirds out walking dogs, and they all waved to Angie, exchanged a few hellos and comments on the weather, a tidbit of neighborhood gossip. It occurred to me that this was far more like a true neighborhood than any I’d been in recently in the city, including my own. These people knew each other, seemed to watch out for each other. One guy even mentioned that he’d shooed off two kids he’d noticed eyeing Angie’s car late last night and suggested she get a Lojack system. Maybe I was missing some greater subtlety, but this seemed the epitome of the family-values concept, and I wondered how those good Christians ensconced in the sterility and affectation of the suburbs saw themselves as poster children for the whole ideal, yet couldn’t tell you the name of the family four houses over on a bet.