not, why bother embarrassing himself by coming clean?”
“When we went out for dinner,” she said, “I offered to split the check. He wouldn’t hear of it.”
“As I said, he’s not impoverished. Just low on funds.”
“And homeless. You know, he could have stayed over. He could have slept in a real bed for a change.”
“I guess it was a point of honor for him not to.”
“Jesus,” she said, and drummed the tabletop with her fingers. “He’s gonna call me and I don’t know what the hell I’m gonna say to him.”
“I don’t think he’ll be calling.”
“He’s dumping me? Where did that come from?”
“He’ll wait for you to call,” I said. “And if you don’t, well, he’ll take that to mean you don’t want to see him again.”
“Oh,” she said, and thought about it. “That makes it easier for me, 230
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doesn’t it? Saves us both the nuisance of a difficult conversation.” She thought some more. “Except maybe that’s tacky. I know how much fun it is to wait around wondering if the phone’s gonna ring. Maybe it’s simpler to make the call and get it over with.” I told her that was up to her. She wanted to know how much she owed me, and I told her the retainer covered her tab in full. In fact, I said, reaching for the check, there was enough left over to cover the coffee.
“I’m glad you found out,” she said, “even if I’m not crazy about what you found out. I knew there was something. He was too good to be true, with that adorable mustache. Plus he smokes.”
“The mustache,” I said.
“What? Don’t tell me it’s gone.”
“No,” I said. “You just reminded me of something, that’s all.” I didn’t wait until I got home. I found a doorway where the street noise wasn’t too bad and called Sussman on my cell phone.
He said, “You thought it over and changed your mind.”
“No, not a chance,” I said. “This is something else entirely, something you said the other day that I keep meaning to ask you about.”
“So now’s your chance. What did I say?”
“It had to do with his mustache. The subject came up, and you said something like the mustache is a good thing, because you could braid a rope out of it and hang him with it.”
“I said that?”
“Something like it, anyway.”
“I guess we can blame it on Brooklyn College,” he said. “Colorful figures of speech, when I’m not using words like proactive. So?”
“What did you mean?”
“Oh, you weren’t there when that came out? I guess maybe you weren’t. All his vacuuming only worked up to a point. We found three little hairs, and they didn’t belong to the woman. One on the sheet next to her and two in the bush, you should pardon the expression.”
“Hairs from a mustache.”
“So the lab techs tell me. Facial hair, anyway, and enough for a All the Flowers Are Dying
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DNA profile. That’s not gonna find him for us, but once we do it’s golden. If there’s one thing the DAs like it’s some good hard physical evidence to put on the table.”
I walked a block and called him again. I guess he had Caller ID and I guess my phone wasn’t blocking it, because his opening words were,
“Now what?”
“About the mustache,” I said.
“So?”
“One thing it tells me is he’s clean-shaven.”
“Now, you mean? How do you figure that? He doesn’t know he left a couple of hairs behind when he was having a snack. And even if he does, the DNA’s not specific to the mustache. It’s in every cell in his body.”
“He didn’t shave,” I said. “He didn’t have to. He just used a little solvent and peeled it off.”
For a moment I thought the connection was broken. Then he said,
“You’re saying it’s a fake mustache.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“And it was no accident he left those hairs there. He placed them there on purpose so that we’d find them.”
“Right.”
