“There could be reasons. It’d be a sure way to create doubt about his guilt.”

She shook her head. “There’s no doubt about that. I had lunch with Scottie. I asked outright if he’d tried to kill me. He said he had.”

“So he finally got honest. I guess that settles it.”

“Not the way you think. I was married to Scott Devens for five years. I know when he’s telling the truth and I know when he’s lying. When he said he’d tried to kill me, I saw something in his eyes, I saw it written on his face. Maybe that sounds strange to you, but I’m an artist. I have a trained eye, I see things that most people miss.”

“What was this something you saw in Scott Devens’s face that the rest of us missed?”

“I saw a Scottie I’d never seen before—a man who can’t stand up for anything—not for his own feelings or convictions and worst of all not even for himself or for the truth. He doesn’t respect himself anymore. He’s sold out. He’s not the Scottie I married.”

“So he’s lying?”

She nodded.

“Isn’t that a very peculiar lie to tell?”

“He knows how to make me hate him.”

“And do you? Hate him?”

“I hate him for thinking so little of me he could imagine I’d believe him. And I hate him for thinking so little of himself that he’d allow his good name to be taken from him.”

“Why would he do it?”

“I guess he’s always wanted an easy, glamorous life. Now he has one. Maybe he was paid.”

“Who paid him?”

“I don’t know. Who profits besides Scottie if Scottie lies? The only person I can think of is the person who—” Her words broke off.

“The person who tried to kill you?”

She sighed. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

“I think you have some interesting ideas.” Cardozo held the clear colorless liquid in the bottle up to the light. “What did you say the name of that pharmacy was?”

“You sold this,” Cardozo said. “Who bought it?” The druggist took the insulin bottle. His frowning eyes traveled from the label to Cardozo’s shield. He went wordlessly behind a glass wall and Cardozo watched him push buttons on a desktop computer.

A machine made muffled tap-dancing noises. The druggist returned and, still saying nothing, handed Cardozo a three-inch printout. Cardozo’s eyes skimmed the dot-matrix letters that spelled Provence Pharmacy and the lot number of the insulin, followed by the name of the prescribing doctor and the prescription number.

The name Faith S. Banks leapt off the paper, jabbing him between the eyes like a fork prong.

He stood frozen, recognizing that something was very much off. His mind backed up six and a half years. Banks had been Babe Vanderwalk’s maid. Her evidence had been central to the case against Scottie Devens. She’d found the brown bag in Devens’s closet and given it to the Vanderwalks’ private investigator. It had held the syringe, insulin, and liquid Valium.

“Have you filled any other prescriptions for this woman?” Cardozo asked.

“We’ve been selling her insulin for twelve years,” the druggist said. “She’s a diabetic.”

Back at the precinct, Cardozo pulled the records on the Devens case.

The bottles of insulin found in the brown bag had had their labels, including the lot numbers, removed. The contents had had to be analyzed before they could be positively identified as insulin. There had been no fingerprints on the bottles.

There was no mention in any of the fives of Faith Banks’s being diabetic.

Because nobody asked, Cardozo thought. Nobody thought of asking if anyone in the house had a legitimate supply of insulin.

But we must have asked, he thought. You don’t not ask a thing like that.

Cardozo puzzled, drinking coffee after coffee, till he was getting a high-pitched note inside his ears like a cricket playing a violin.

We must have asked and Banks must have lied.

He felt his way further.

The insulin bottles in the brown bag had been stripped of identifying marks. But the Alstetter bottle had been traceable straight to Banks. How come?

What came to him was that the first bottles had been part of a careful frame aimed at convincing the police; the fourth insulin bottle had been a careless embellishment, executed long after the Vanderwalks’ professional investigator had gone home, aimed at convincing an amateur magazine sleuth named Dina Alstetter.

Cardozo lifted the phone and dialed Judge Tom Levin’s number.

Cardozo followed Judge Levin into the sitting room of his Brooklyn Heights town house. There was a fresh bottle of Johnnie Walker black label on the sideboard, glasses and ice waiting.

The judge handed him a glass.

The transcript was sitting on the table, a brown binder with the label already beginning to peel off. People of the State of New York v. William Scott Devens.

Cardozo took a seat in the corduroy easy chair, his eyes bent to the transcript. He sipped Scotch and made notes on a small lined pad.

After page 73, when the defense was moving to introduce a medical report into evidence, there was a blank page.

Cardozo turned to the next page. It, too, was blank. He riffled quickly through the remainder of the transcript. All blank.

“Tom,” he said, “would you take a look at this?”

Tom Levin took the transcript and stood turning pages. “This is downright interesting,” he muttered.

“Why would anyone steal pages from a sealed record?”

“Because sealing a record is bullshit. Every day of the week people like me get into sealed records, and whoever wanted this record sealed was making sure people like you didn’t read it.”

Cardozo read the newspaper articles on Babe Devens.

According to the Post, she had returned to her life of luxury among the rich and famous of New York. The News said her five-bedroom town house on Sutton Place was assessed at 4.2 million dollars. Her neighbors included two U.N. ambassadors, the world’s leading operatic tenor, a movie star, and a cousin of the queen of England. People magazine said that before her coma she and her husband had thrown parties for some of the biggest names in society and show business. Any day now she would return to her rightful place as queen of the glitterati.

The guests in the photographs of Scottie and Babe Devens’s last party looked to Cardozo like a bunch of rouged-up clowns, living in a world that rained diamonds and tinsel and cocaine.

He couldn’t picture her in that society. Didn’t want to.

He pushed the buzzer of number 18 Sutton Place, a gray slate town house with French château turrets. A stiff-necked butler let him in.

“Would you care to wait in the sitting room, sir?”

“That’s all right, Wheelock. Here I am.”

Cardozo turned. Babe Devens was wheeling herself out of the elevator, hair honey blond and eyes sky blue, and his heart gave a little jump of pleasure. Her blue silk afternoon dress shimmered faintly. Smiling, she stretched out her hand. “You’re very kind to come.”

He took the hand, held it, and said “Hello,” and when she looked at him strangely he realized he’d forgotten to let go.

“Do you think it’s too warm for iced tea on the terrace?”

“The terrace is fine by me,” he said.

He followed her through a room that looked as though someone had robbed a museum to furnish it. The thought came to him that if he accidentally knocked an objet off a table he’d be busting two hundred thousand dollars. He felt clumsy and intimidated, and he made up for it by adopting a careful swagger.

She used her chair smoothly, her movements strong and practiced and precise. He opened the terrace door for her, and she wheeled her chair to a little wicker patio table.

A row of boxwood bushes and small dogwoods just beyond the flagstones afforded a token sort of privacy, marking the space off from the rest of the park. Beyond the hedge a tree-fringed lawn stretched almost to the river.