I nodded.

“Fun’s what it’s all about,” I said.

“And the winner dies broke,” he said.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Susan and I were walking back to Linnaean Street from the Charles Hotel where we had lunched with her friends Chuck and Janet Olson at Henrietta’s Table.

“Your friends are nice,” I said.

“Yes, they are.”

“As nice as my friends?” I said.

“Like Hawk, say? Or Vinnie Morris?”

“Well, yes.”

“Please!” Susan said.

We were on Garden Street walking past the Harvard Police Station. I decided to move the conversation forward, and told her about my encounter with Louis Vincent at Hall, Peary.

“Kleenex?” Susan said. “Women are like Kleenex?”

“Un huh. Use and discard. There’s plenty more.”

I watched her ears closely to see if any steam escaped. But she was controlled.

“The man is an absolute fucking pig,” she said.

“There’s that,” I said.

“I want him to be the stalker.”

“Because he’s a pig?”

“Yes.”

“Does he fit the profile?”

Susan glared at me for a moment, before she said, “No.”

“He appears to be one of the masters of the universe,” I said. “Good-looking, well married, good job, lots of dough, endless poon tang on the side. Stalkers are usually losers.”

“I know.”

“It’s usually about control,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I’d guess this guy is in control.”

“Not of his libido,” Susan said.

“No, maybe not,” I said. “On the other hand KC wasn’t bopping him under duress.”

Susan gave a long sigh.

“No,” Susan said, “she wasn’t.”

“And she didn’t dump him, did she?”

Susan thought about that.

“In one sense,” she said, “maybe not. She left her husband to marry him. He said, ‘I won’t marry you.’ But who said, ‘Therefore it’s over’?”

I raised both eyebrows. I could raise one eyebrow, like Brian Donlevy, but I didn’t very often, because most people didn’t know who Brian Donlevy was, or what I was doing with my face.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll ask.”

Susan looked pleased.

“Maybe he could still be the stalker.”

“We can always hope,” I said.

We reached Linnaean Street and turned right toward Susan’s place.

“How about that thing you’re doing for Hawk?”

“Well, it is, I believe, turning into a hair ball.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t think the Lamont kid killed himself.”

“Why not?”

I told her how his friends said he was happy and how they were scornful of the possibility that he was having an affair with Robinson Nevins and how the window was hard to open and how Lamont was said to be approximately the size of a dandelion, but not as strong.

“Suicides often appear happy prior to the suicide,” Susan said. “They’ve decided to do it.”

“Thus solving all their problems.”

“And getting even with whomever they are getting even.”

“Which is usually why people do it?”

“Yes,” Susan said. “The pathology is often similar, oddly enough, to the pathology which causes stalking – see what you’ve made me do is a kind of back door control. It forces emotion from the object of your ambivalence.”

“I don’t think he could have opened the window,” I said.

“Maybe it was conveniently open when the time came. Maybe its openness was the presenting moment, so to speak.”

“I checked,” I said. “It was thirty-six degrees, raining hard, with a strong wind on the day he went out.”

Susan smiled at me.

“So much for psychoanalytic hypothesis,” she said.

“It’s very helpful,” I said. “Especially when you asked about who actually ended KC’s affair. But it isn’t intended to replace the truth, is it?”

“No. It’s intended to get at it.”

We went into Susan’s office. Her office and waiting room and what she called her library (it looked remarkably like a spare room with a bath to me) were on the first floor. Her quarters, and Pearl’s, were on the second. When Susan opened the door to her living room, Pearl bounded about giving and receiving wet kisses, torn with her passion to greet us both at the same time. But, being a dog, she quickly got over her bifurcating ambivalence and went back and sat on the sofa with her tongue out and looked at us happily.

Susan got me a beer from her refrigerator and poured herself a bracing glass of Evian, and we sat down together at her kitchen counter. Pearl sat on the floor beside us in case we moved into eating.

“So where to now,” Susan said.

“One thing is I’ll ask KC to go through the breakup, see if he might have experienced it as her leaving him. Second, I figure that Louis has fooled around before.”

“I think you can bank on it,” Susan said.

“So I’m going to see if I can find a few former girlfriends and see if there’s been any stalking. If he’s a wacko, KC can’t be the only one he’s been a wacko with.”

Susan nodded and sipped some Evian. I drank some beer.

“How about the other case?”

“I’ve got a stack of back issues of the magazine that Lamont published: OUTrageous.”

“As in OUT of the closet?”

“Yes. I’ll read through that and see if there’s a suspect. I’ll look at the plans for future issues, which I also have, and see if there’s any suspects there.”

“And if there aren’t?”

“Then I’ll try to establish whether there was or was not a relationship between Nevins and Lamont, and if there was why people didn’t know and if there wasn’t why people said there was.”

“And if that doesn’t work?”

“I’ll ask you,” I said.

“For some psychoanalytic theory?”

“Can’t hurt,” I said. “What I think we should do is go take a shower and brush our teeth and lie on my bed and see what kind of theory we can develop.”

“I’m pretty sure I know what will develop,” I said.

“Should we shower together?” Susan said.

“If we do, things may develop too soon.”

“Good point,” Susan said. “I’ll go first.”

“And Pearl?” I said.

“In the living room with the TV on Fox – loud. She loves to watch Catherine Crier.”

“Anyone would,” I said.

And Susan disappeared into her bedroom.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

KC Roth poured some white wine into her glass.

“I was about to have lunch, I could make us both something,” she said.

“Thank you, no,” I said. “Just a couple questions.”

“Did you see him?”

“Vincent?”

She smiled as if I had prayed aloud.

“I saw him,” I said. “Handsome devil.”

“Oh isn’t he,” she said. “What did he say?”

“He said he didn’t stalk you.”

“What else.”

She was sitting on the pink sofa in the bay window of her beige living room. I was back in the uncomfortable gray chair.

“Nothing of consequence,” I said. “Could you run back over the breakup.”

Her eyes filled. She sipped some more white wine.

“I don’t think I can,” she said.

“Well, let me help you focus. Who said that you would no longer sleep together.”

“What difference does it make?” she said. “It’s over.”

There were tears now on her cheeks. She wiped them with the back of her left hand.

“It might make a difference,” I said. “I know it’s painful, but think back. Who decided that you’d stop making love.”

She drank wine again and looked down at her lap and answered me so softly that I couldn’t hear her.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“I did,” she said. “I told him that if he wouldn’t leave his wife then I wouldn’t fuck him until he did.”

“Negotiating ploy?” I said.

She looked up and her eyes though teary were harder than one would have thought.

“I was desperate,” she said.

“But you meant it.”

“Well, he had to lose something too,” she said. “He couldn’t have everything. I have to leave my beautiful house and my beautiful daughter…” Now she was not just teary, now she was crying. “I have to live in this… this cell block. He can’t keep on fucking me. He has to give up something.”