He was a bright guy with a quirky sense of humour, and the parts of his brain that had avoided being hollowed out by too much LSD remained brilliant. His intelligence attracted me, along with the fact that he was a lost soul whom I figured I could rescue. I had no plans for anything permanent with him. I thought I would clean him up, dress him well, put him on display, and move on to the next lost soul. Tina called it ugly puppy syndrome. “Women like you,” she lectured me, “choose the ugliest runt in the litter and think you can turn him into best of show, but you know what? He’ll still be a mutt.” Her husband, I assumed, came with a pedigree.

Anyway, the nihilist wasn’t much to look at and was even less appealing to live with. In fact, the only clear memory I retain of him and his two-room hovel over a butcher shop was a poster he had pinned on the wall beside his bed. The poster showed two buzzards sitting on a dead tree in the middle of the desert. One buzzard is saying to the other, “Patience, hell. I’m gonna kill something.”

I was running out of patience. I didn’t need to kill something, however. Somebody else had done that work. There’s always someone else. Or something else …

Gabe had said that when he called me the night he died, when I was with Mother. There’s something else, he said, and I said, I know, and Gabe replied, How could you know?

How could I know that I had slept with Mel? That’s not what he meant. Gabe meant there was something else he had to tell me, something I could not possibly know.

Patience, hell.

I DON’T KNOW WHY anybody would want to be a cop. Really. All that stuff about wanting to grab bad guys (what do they do about bad women?) comes from people who sit around writing scripts for movies and TV shows. Every male cop I’ve ever known, and this includes Gabe, wants three things from the job: a chance to meet and screw women under various circumstances; an opportunity to hang out with people who complain about the same things; and a fat pension.

Cops will say they do it because they want to solve crimes and rid the world of bad people, but that’s not entirely true. And they don’t do it for the excitement, either. Not detectives.

Most detective work doesn’t involve car chases, handcuffing suspects, or driving above the speed limit with red lights flashing and sirens screaming. It involves reading dull reports and interviewing even duller people who either don’t know what the hell you’re talking about or don’t want to talk to you in the first place. A lot of it’s done at battered desks in cluttered offices with dusty computer screens and wastebaskets filled with empty coffee cups. So I expected to find both Harold Hayashida and Mel in the detective squad area at Central Police Station. I was only half right.

Waiting for the duty cop at the reception desk to finish talking on the telephone, I saw Hayashida in his cubicle, bent over his desk with his palms flat on the surface and an expression on his face that looked as though he was working on a difficult crossword puzzle. Watching him gave me something to do while the duty cop muttered into the telephone receiver, making comments that convinced me he was talking to his mistress, his wife, or someone’s lawyer.

“Yeah … No … Uh-huh … Never … Impossible … Not likely … Got it … Will do …” His last words before hanging up sounded like a sermon. “When it all comes down the pike and everything starts going off the rails, remember who stirred the pot and got the ball rolling, all right?”

He slammed the receiver down and looked up at me. “What would you like, lady?” he asked in his best civil servant welcome.

I resisted the urge to ask if I could borrow a metaphor and requested to speak to either Sergeant Hayashida or Sergeant Holiday.

He asked what about.

I replied, “A murder.”

He reacted as though I had said a parking ticket. “Whose?”

“My husband’s.”

His eyes narrowed and he actually smiled. “Gabe Marshall’s?”

By this time Harold had noticed me standing behind the counter, and he called across to the duty cop, saying it was all right, I could come in.

“YOU’RE HERE TO HELP THE INVESTIGATION, RIGHT?”

We were in his cubicle, although Hayashida clearly wished I was somewhere else. He avoided my eyes, keeping his on a handful of papers I couldn’t read.

“If I can.” It was all the justification I had for being there.

“You can help if you have any information to pass on to us.” He tossed the papers aside and looked directly at me for the first time. Something I had done or said, or something someone else had done or said, had upset him. More to the point, it had pissed him off. “Have you?”

“I have a name,” I said. “Eugene Griswold.”

Hayashida’s face was a blank. Clearly, I had told him something he didn’t know. “Who?” he asked.

“Griswold. On the street, he’s apparently known as Grizz.”

He sat back in his chair and stared at me. “How do you know this? That the guy’s name, the guy called Grizz, is really Eugene Griswold?”

“Don’t you guys know?” Dumb question. Hayashida didn’t. “Mike Pilato told me.”

“What the hell are you doing talking to Mike Pilato?”

“Why can’t I talk to anybody I want? In fact, Mike Pilato was a lot more willing to talk to me than you guys are. And why do you keep parking a plumber’s truck in front of Pilato’s place? He knows who you are, what you’re doing.”

“I don’t know anything about a plumber’s van, okay?”

“You just can’t talk about it. Pilato’s right. You’re both playing games. Meanwhile, people get killed. Like my husband.”

Hayashida absorbed this, then reached for a pencil and pad of paper. He began writing, I assumed, Eugene Griswold’s name on the paper. I confirmed it by leaning forward to watch, and began spelling Griswold’s name aloud. “G-R-I-S—”

Hayashida muttered that he could figure it out for himself, damn it. “This Griswold guy,” he said, tossing the pad aside. “He work for Pilato?”

“Doesn’t work for anybody. He died about two hundred years ago. In Connecticut.”

He tilted his head. “Why are you wasting my time?”

“Mel Holiday knows the name,” I said. “And so does Mike Pilato. And you know this guy named Grizz. But nobody can put the pieces together. What is this, a police investigation or a game of charades? And why were you upset with me for wearing the ring Gabe gave me? You think he stole it?”

Hayashida was calm enough to ignore my questions. “Who else have you been talking to? About Gabe’s death?”

“Glynnis Dalgetty, Dougal’s wife. Dougal Dalgetty was supposedly killed by the guy called Grizz, although she thinks Gabe was—”

“Just so you know,” Hayashida interrupted, “Glynnis Dalgetty was convicted of manslaughter about ten years ago.”

My turn to sit back in the chair. “She was? Manslaughter?”

“Shot a guy in a hotel room. Said he was trying to rape her. Which, back then, might have been a possibility. Except she couldn’t explain what she was doing in the hotel room with a guy who used to work for Mike Pilato, one of Pilato’s guys who maybe tried running his own show or was caught skimming from Pilato’s take, we don’t know for sure. We don’t know where Glynnis Dalgetty got the gun, either. Or why the guy was naked. Or why she shot him six times, including twice in the head.”

“Glynnis?” I tried picturing her with a gun in her hand, pulling the trigger six times.

“It was enough to get her maybe fifteen years for second-degree murder, based on the facts. I mean, it was such an obvious set-up to us. The court didn’t see it that way, as a set-up, I mean. The court considered it practically justifiable homicide. All she got was a two-year suspended sentence on the lesser charge. Nobody here went for a murder conviction. Man with criminal record tries to rape helpless woman, woman defends herself, man loses his life, who cares? That’s what the court decided, based on her defence.”