Epstein grinned.
“You got a plan?” he said.
“I want to bring him down,” I said. “For the murders.”
“And your FBI? He killed one of my agents. You want me to stand around and reload for you?”
“You get him for subversion or whatever you were looking at him for in the fi rst place,” I said.
“And if we overlap?”
“We’ll adjust,” I said.
“A race?” Epstein said.
“First one to bust him wins?” I said.
“He gets busted everybody wins,” Epstein said. “I don’t care who gets the credit.”
“J. Edgar must be doing ring-around-the-rosy in his grave,”
I said.
28.
And he didn’t ask who shot the mystery assassin?”
Susan said.
“No.”
“Well, that’s some sort of vote of confidence, isn’t it,” she said.
“He knows I wouldn’t tell him.”
“And he wants your help,” Susan said.
“I can do things that are illegal for him.”
“And you,” she said.
“Sometimes,” I said.
“But he can do things you can’t,” Susan said.
“He has resources I lack.”
“So you avoid the minefields,” Susan said. “And you both know that you’re doing it, and you know why, and you don’t say anything.”
“We both want the guy that killed Doherty,” I said. We were at my place, I was making supper. She was at my kitchen counter, on the living room side. Pearl had claimed the couch, which she managed to occupy more fully than one would think possible for a seventy-fi ve-pound dog.
“It’s about Doherty,” Susan said.
“Man was murdered,” I said.
“His wife was murdered too,” Susan said.
I mixed bread crumbs and pignolia nuts with a little olive oil, and began to toast them in a fry pan on low.
“Doherty was one of Epstein’s,” I said. “Makes it kind of personal.”
“And you?” Susan said.
“Guy’s going along doing his job, living his life, and his wife takes up with another guy, and it breaks his heart, and then gets him killed,” I said. “That needs to be evened off a little.”
I took the fry pan off the fire and emptied the toasted crumbs and pignolias into a bowl. I had a large pot of water boiling on the stove. I put some whole-wheat linguine in it and set my timer.
“But she doesn’t need evening off? Because she caused the trouble in the fi rst place.”
“Alderson’s responsible for both,” I said. “We get him, we even everything off.”
“You don’t hold her responsible?”
“I don’t know enough,” I said. “Maybe Doherty drove her to it.”
Susan nodded. She was sipping a glass of sauvignon blanc.
“Happens,” she said.
After the pasta had cooked for three minutes I added slices of yellow squash and zucchini.
“You think I’m overidentifying with Doherty because of what happened to us all that time ago?” I said.
Susan smiled.
“Happens,” she said.
“It didn’t get me killed,” I said.
“But people died,” Susan said.
