“Even without Hawk,” I said, “I am not an amateur.”
“True,” Susan said. “Have you ever considered that your person might have been suicidal?”
“Nathan Smith?”
“Yes. A closeted gay man. Trying to pretend.”
“There was no gun,” I said.
“Too bad, he so fit the profile. A life spent in deception, finally too much.”
I shrugged.
“How are you with this kid’s death?” I said.
“I’ve gone over every therapy session ten times.”
“You remember them all?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And I did what there was to do,” Susan said.
“And better than most people could have,” I said.
“How do you know,” Susan said. “You’ve never been in therapy with me.”
I smiled.
“Why, this is therapy,” I said. “Nor am I out of it.”
“Hamlet?” Susan said.
“Mephistopheles,” I said.
“Who?”
“Marlowe,” I said. “Doctor Faustus.”
“Smarty-pants.”
“So how come I can’t figure out what’s going on with the Nathan Smith thing?”
“I’ll bet you could if Christopher Marlowe did it.”
“A slam dunk,” I said.
“Have you thought about what kind of woman marries a gay man?” Susan said.
“Yes.”
“Do you have a conclusion?”
“No. I can’t figure her out.”
“Maybe you need to,” Susan said. “Maybe you need to find out more about Mr. Smith’s life as a gay man. Maybe you need to find out why Mrs. Smith married him.”
“A tip?” I said. “A crime-stopper tip?”
“Two tips,” Susan said. “I have a Ph.d. from Harvard.”
“A hotbed of crime-stopping,” I said.
“A hotbed,” Susan said.
We drove on to Newburyport. Susan shopped. Pearl and I stood outside each shop, and waited. Pearl slept in the car while we ate lunch at the Black Cow. Susan and Pearl and I went for a walk on the beach at Plum Island. None of us talked about business for the rest of the day.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
I went over to Pequod Bank on Monday morning to talk with Marvin Conroy. He wasn’t there. I said I would wait. They were cool with it. I sat in a chair and watched people discuss checking accounts and loans for three hours. At noon I asked if there was a number for Conroy. There was. But they couldn’t give me his home phone number.
“Could you call him for me?” I said.
The acting second assistant junior auxiliary vice president who was working with me looked startled.
“Me? Call him at home?”
“Y. Yes.”
“Is it, ah, an emergency?” she said.
“Life and death,” I said.
“Not really?” she said.
“Really,” I said.
She hesitated. I fixed her with my gleaming blue stare. She shrugged and opened her Rolodex and picked up the phone. She gave her hair a little toss to get the phone in under it, and dialed a number. I waited. She was wearing one of those thin, loose-fitting ankle-length flowered dresses that women sometimes wore in Cambridge, I
