"And it runs how long?"

"Four and a half hours with an intermission."

Susan smiled encouragingly.

"It's very controversial," she said.

"Excellent," I said.

"Maybe a fight will break out."

She smiled at me again, a smile perfectly capable of launching a thousand ships and very likely to burn the topless towers of Ilium.

We got to the box office, collected our tickets, and went into the theater. The theater was full of people who lived on Cabot Hill and could trace their lineage back to the British Isles. It looked like a Cabot College faculty meeting. In a town fifty percent Portuguese and fifty percent Chinese, the theater was a hundred percent neither.

"I haven't seen so many Anglo Saxons in one place since the Republican convention," I said.

"You've never been to the Republican Convention," Susan said.

"I've never been asked," I said.

The houselights dimmed. The play began. On stage there were men dressed as women and women dressed as men, and white people in blackface and black people in white face and a rabbi named O'Leary, and a priest named Cohen. I knew the names because they were printed on a big sandwich board which each of the actors wore throughout the first act. There was someone in a dog suit who kept saying meow. There was very little dialogue, and the actors moved slowly about the stage with angular gestures, stopping periodically in frozen tableau, while an offstage voice recited something ominous that sounded like a hip-hop adaptation of Thus Spake Zarathustra.

After an hour of this Susan leaned toward me and said, "What do you think?"

"It's heavy-handed but impenetrable," I said.

"Not an easy achievement," Susan said.

The lead actor was in fool's motley, divided in two vertical halves. One side was explicitly female, the other side explicitly male. He/she came downstage and began to speak directly to the audience.

"I am Tiresias," he she said.

"An old man with wrinkled dugs."

He/she half turned and looked at a figure in some sort of triangulated costume downstage left. The orchestra suddenly began to play up tempo and he she began to sing.

"Lucky in love, lucky in love, what else matters if you're lucky in love?"

The actor stopped. Simultaneously there was a flat crack from the back of the theater. I recognized the sound. The orchestra continued to play the accompaniment. The actor took a silent step backwards and a red stain began to soak through the costume. I got up and started for the stage as the actor sank to his knees, and then fell backwards onto the floor, his legs bent partially back under him. Still the audience didn't get it. The other actors were motionless for a moment, and then one of them, a tall actress in blackface, lunged forward and dropped to her knees beside the actor just as I reached them.

There were people standing in the wings. I shouted at one of them.

"Call 911," I yelled.

"Tell them he's been shot."

I felt for the actor's pulse. I couldn't find it. I tilted his head, blew two big breaths into his mouth.

"You know CPR?" I said.

She shook her head. I pushed her gently out of the way with one arm and started chest compression. The front of his shirt was slick with blood. A pair of tan slacks appeared beside me as I pumped his chest. Allan Edmonds loafers. No socks.

A voice said, "I'm a doctor."

"Good," I said.

"Jump in."

He said to someone, "Get me something, towels, anything."

He said to me, "Pulse?"

"No," I said.

I saw his hand reach in and take the actor's arm and feel for the pulse in his wrist and hold it, feeling. Then some towels came into view and he said, "Stop for a minute."

I did. He ripped down the front of the actor's shirt and wiped the chest with a folded hand towel. There was a small entry wound, directly over the heart. The flesh was puffed slightly around the edges of the puncture, from which the blood welled as fast as he could wipe it away.

"Shit," he said, and folded the towel one more time and put it over the wound.

"A rock and a hard place," the doctor said. He seemed to be talking to himself more than to us.

"The chest pressure will increase the bleeding, but if his heart isn't started he's dead anyway."

"Bullet should be right in his heart," I said, between breaths.

"Given the location of the entry wound."

"Probably," the doctor said.

"Which makes it pretty much academic."

He paused for a moment. Then he shrugged.

"It's the best we can do," he said.

"He's not going to start up," I said.

"I know," the doctor said.

But we kept at it for what seemed forever long after the actor was gone, long after anyone thought he wasn't.

The ambulance arrived and the EMTs took over the futile effort.

I stood up feeling a little dizzy, and realized that the theater was still full, and entirely silent. The cast ringed us in a motionless circle.

Susan had come up on stage, and a nice-looking, black-haired woman wearing a big diamond and a wedding ring was standing by the orchestra pit, apparently waiting for the doctor. Two Port City cops had arrived. One cop was talking into his radio. Soon there'd be many cops.

"Any chance?" Susan said.

I shrugged.

"He's got a hole in his heart," I said.

Susan looked at the doctor. He nodded.

"Not my specialty," he said.

"I'm an orthopedic surgeon. But I'd say he was dead when he hit the floor."

I looked at the tallish actress standing beside us in her ridiculous black makeup. Her face was vacant. The pupils of her eyes seemed big.

"You okay?" I said.

She shook her head. More cops arrived. Uniforms and lab guys and detectives. I recognized DeSpain.

"I know you," he said.

"Spenser," I said.

"How are you, DeSpain."

"You used to work out of the Middlesex DA's office."

"Long time ago," I said.

"I'm private now."

DeSpain nodded.

"You did some work up here five, six years ago," DeSpain said.

He looked at the doctor.

"Who's this," he said.

"Steve Franklin," the doctor said.

"I was in the audience I'm an MD."

DeSpain nodded. He was a big blond guy with bright blue eyes that seemed to have no depth at all.

"DeSpain," he said.

"I'm Chief of Police here. He going to make it?"

"I don't think so," the doctor said.

DeSpain looked back at me.

"So," DeSpain said.

"Tell me about it."

"Shot once," I said.

"From the back of the theater. I didn't see the shooter. Probably a.22 from the sound and the entry hole, maybe a target gun. It was a hell of a shot. Right through the heart."

"The killer may know something of anatomy," the doctor said.

"Most people don't know exactly where the heart is."

"A good shot that knows anatomy," DeSpain said as if to himself.

"Hell, we've got the bastard cornered."

We got out of there very late in the evening, and drove Christopholous home. He lived on the first floor of a two-family house next to a Chinese market, across the street from a fish-processing plant.

"Can you help us on this?" Christopholous said when I parked out front.

"The murder?"