Pilato leaned back in his chair. “Nice speech,” he said.

What the hell. “It was no damn speech,” I said, tossing aside any concern about consonants or my safety. “It’s what I need to do. Somebody said you knew my husband. If you say you didn’t know Gabe, fine, I’m gone. If you knew him, please help me. That’s all I ask.”

He nodded. “Better speech.” Before I could tell him to go to hell, which I figured would either make him kiss me or shoot me, he said, “Ask anything you want. I’ll answer it, if it doesn’t incriminate me.”

I asked if he had ever met Gabe.

He placed his hands on the desk in front of him. “Yes,” he said. “I have met most detectives in this city. Sometimes we’re in the same business. Different sides, same business.”

“When did you speak to him last?”

“Maybe two weeks ago.”

“Where?”

“In a bar down the street. Place called Mahady’s.” A glance at me, so he could watch my reaction. “I own it.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Not what. Who. We were talking about someone. Your husband wanted to know what I knew about this person.”

“What was the name of this person, the one my husband asked about?”

Some successful people are actors when it comes to getting others to do things, or to hear things in a certain way. It’s timing, it’s the delivery, it’s the expression, it’s the voice. It’s acting. Pilato was an actor. He paused and watched me, building suspense. Then he said, “Eugene Griswold.”

“Who is he?”

“Was,” Pilato said, his eyebrows back in place. “Who was he.”

My god. Another murder victim. “What happened to him?”

A shrug. “He died.”

“From what?”

“Probably old age.” He leaned forward, his eyes on mine. “Some manichino named Eugene Griswold, the only guy with that name I found, or had people find for me, opened a place in Connecticut, I don’t know, somewhere around 1776. An inn, a hotel, whatever you want to call it. Opened it with his brothers. They ran it, the three of them. Partners. It’s still there, the inn. You can look it up. The Griswold Inn, someplace in Connecticut. Might go there someday and look at it.” One more smile, quick and cold. “Maybe you come with me, eh? Have a dirty weekend together?” Instead of fading this time, the smile widened into a grin. His teeth were too porcelain-perfect to be real.

When I didn’t respond, he leaned back in his chair. “That’s the only Eugene Griswold I know about. It’s the only Eugene Griswold anybody knows about. I had never heard that name before your husband met me at Mahady’s and asked if I knew him. ‘Who’s Eugene Griswold?’ your husband says, and I say, ‘I don’t know, should I?’ and your husband tells me Griswold is some big shot, some new capo in town, and maybe I should look him up. So I do. I have somebody look him up, this Griswold. Nobody knows him. Somebody, you don’t have to know who, it’s none of your business, gets on a computer and finds out about this guy in Connecticut, started a bar two hundred years ago. That’s all I know about a Eugene Griswold. That’s all anybody knows about him. Probably more than your husband knew. Your husband thought he was local, some new local guy. Your husband was wrong.”

“I was told,” I began. I swallowed, closed my eyes, and began again. “I was told that this man, this person worked for you—”

“Do I look that old?” He grinned.

“—and his street name was Grizz.”

“I was told that too.”

“And you never heard of anyone by that name?”

“Never.”

“How about Dougal Dalgetty?”

He stared at me as though considering whether to answer or not. Finally, “What do you want to know about him?”

“Did he work for you?”

“He worked for my company.” Pilato was finding something interesting on his thumbnail. It gave him a reason to avoid my eyes.

“Doing what?”

“That’s no business of yours. It’s no business of anybody’s.”

“Do you know who shot him?”

His eyes jumped from his thumb to me. “No,” he said in a voice that reminded me this was not a man to cross or insult. Or even, for that matter, to question. “And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”

“You told his widow, Glynnis, that my husband killed him.”

“I said possibly. Your husband possibly killed him.”

“Why? Why would you say my husband might have shot Dougal Dalgetty?”

“Dougal and I talked. He told me things. About dealing with police officers.”

“Were you sorry to hear Dougal was killed?”

“I’m sorry to hear anybody is killed. Always I’m sorry. But what can I do?”

“If you knew who did it, who shot Dougal Dalgetty, would you do something about it?”

“What, you mean get revenge?” I wasn’t sure if he was amused or angry. “You think I get revenge? You think I’m playing in a schoolyard, you take my bicycle, I take yours?”

“I’m just—”

“You hit my friend, I hit your friend? You think that’s how my world works?”

“It’s what most people would think.”

“Most people are stupid, right? I believe in punishment, not revenge. Punishment is not revenge. Punishment is better than revenge. Punishment is to reduce crime and reform the criminal. Those are a woman’s words. Her name was Elizabeth Fry. Reduce crime and reform the criminal. That’s what she said. I punish people who need it. I don’t take revenge.”

I twisted in the chair to look behind me. We were still alone. The room was quiet. Everything was quiet. No noise entered from outside. Not the rumble of trucks on the road or trains on the nearby railroad track. Nothing. The room also appeared to be darker than when I had entered.

I looked back at Pilato, who had been watching me with amusement. “Do you have other people working for you?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“Why aren’t they here? In this building?”

“How do you know they aren’t?”

He was toying with me. To my surprise, the realization made me relax a little. Maybe we could find something in common. “What do you think of Walter Freeman?” I asked.

“Big shot cop.”

“Not a nice guy.”

He shrugged.

“Maybe even crooked?”

“Crooked? Do you mean dishonest? Shady?”

“Any of them.”

Another shrug. “Who knows?”

“You would.”

Slowly shaking his head, he said, “No, I wouldn’t. I never know who’s trying to steal from me or steal from somebody else until it’s too late. I keep getting surprised by people I think are bastards and sometimes it turns out they aren’t. And other people, the ones who act like they’re models that the rest of the world, people who would spit on me if they could or see me locked up for the rest of my life, the rest of the world thinks they’re grandi uomini and they’re …” He shrugged and looked away, searching for the words he wanted. He looked back and studied me for a moment, and I had the impression that this might be one of the longest conversations Mike Pilato had had with a woman in some time without being in bed with her. “Is that what you think of me? That I steal money and kill people?”

“I think—” I began, not sure what I would say next. I didn’t have to say anything. He cut me off with a wave of his hand.

“It doesn’t matter what you think. I’m not interested. But let me tell you something. Do you know St. Patrick’s, the church over on Murray Street?”

I told him I knew of it. I had never visited it.

“Go. Go sometime, go look at the old marble baptismal font in the vestibule. Everybody loves it. Me,” and he made the classic gesture—shoulders hunched, palms up, eyes closed, bottom lip thrust out—”what do I know? I’m just a dumb Luigi, a pasta eater, a garlic lover. All I know is, it’s four, maybe five hundred years old. That’s what they tell me. Penteli marble, sat for hundreds of years in an old church in Agerola, near the Amalfi Coast, before an earthquake knocked it over, the church. Do you know it? The Amalfi Coast, south of Naples?”