“That Camelotian hindsight is not unusual in grief,” Susan said.
“I know,” I said. “I’ve seen some grief myself.”
“It’s a form of denial.”
“I know. What I’m trying to get hold of is how long the denial has been going on.”
“Yes,” Susan said.
“And what’s being denied,” I said.
Susan nodded. The fire hissed as some sap boiled out of the sawn end of one of the logs. The salmon caviar was gone. The champagne was getting low.
“So what are you going to do?” Susan said.
“Start from the other end.”
“You mean look into her past?”
“Yeah. Where she was born. Where she went to school, that stuff. Maybe something will turn up.”
“Wouldn’t the police have done that?” Susan said.
“On a celebrity case like this, with an uncertain victim, maybe,” I said. “But this victim is a well-known pillar of the community. Her life’s an open book. They haven’t the money or the reason to chase her back to her childhood.”
“So why will you do it?” Susan said.
“I don’t know what else to do,” I said.
“You want to eat?”
Susan drank some of her champagne and looked at me over the rim of her glass.
“How attractive was Tripp’s secretary, exactly?” Susan said.
“Quite,” I said.
Susan smiled.
“How nice,” she said. “Perhaps after we’ve eaten buffalo tenderloin and sipped a dessert wine on the couch and watched the fire settle, you’ll want to think about which of us is, or is not, going to ball you in the bedroom until sunrise.”
“You’re far more attractive than she is, Buffalo gal,” I said.
“Oh, good,” she said.
We were quiet as I put the meat on the grill and put the corn pudding in the oven.
“Sunrise?” I said.
“The hyperbole of jealous passion,” Susan said.
chapter eleven
I SAT WITH Lee Farrell in the near empty squad room at Homicide. Quirk’s office was at the far end of the room. The glass door had Commander stenciled on it in black letters: Quirk wasn’t there. There was only one cop in the squad room, a heavy bald guy with a red face and a big belly, who had a phone shrugged up against his ear and his feet up on the desk. A cigarette with a long ash hung from his mouth and waggled a little as he talked. Ash occasionally fluttered off the end and flaked onto his shirtfront. He paid it no mind. He had his gun jammed inside his belt in front, and it was obviously digging into him while he sat. Two or three times he shifted to try and ease it, and finally he took it out and put it on his desk. It was a Glock.
“Everybody got Glocks now?” I said.
“Yeah,” Farrell said. “Department’s trying to stay even with the drug dealers.”
“Succeeding?”
Farrell laughed. “Kids got Glocks,” he said. “Fucking drug dealers have close air support.”
The fat cop continued to talk. He was animated, waving his right hand about as he talked. When the cigarette burned down, he spat it out, stuck another one in his mouth and lit it with one hand.
“The background stuff on Olivia says she was born in Alton, South Carolina, in 1948,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Father and mother deceased, no siblings.”
“Yeah.”
“BA, Duke, 1969; MA, Boston University, 1982.”
Farrell nodded. While I talked he unwrapped a stick of gum and shoved it in his mouth. He didn’t offer me any.
“Taught Freshman English classes part-time at Shawmut College, gave an Art Appreciation course at Boston Adult Ed in Low Country Realism.”
“Whatever that is,” Farrell said.
“Vermeer,” I said, “Rembrandt, those guys.”
