“A boat?”

“Something for the boss. External relations. Just a party thing, he said.”

“But he’s out of money.”

“There’s always money for a boat, V.”

So there we were, on the early flight home, our carry-ons stashed in the overhead compartment, along with the tool locker dug up from Jimmy Sullivan’s basement the night before. I watched Kimberly concentrate on the volume on her lap and as I did there was something about her that reminded me of the photographs. The line of her neck as she bent toward the book, the shape of her hand, the wisp of hair that covered her ear. I knew it was a trick, a transference from one woman to another, and I knew why it was happening. But still, it had its effect, the similarities, and I felt a wave of emotion toward her, a strangely paternal emotion.

“How’s the reading material?” I said.

Before she raised her head, she carefully put her finger on the page of the notebook on her lap, a notebook full of diary entries twenty years old that we had found in the locker.

“Gad, V. She can’t even blow her nose without writing all about it. And she goes on and on about the sex, like no one’s ever hooked up before. Talk about a slut. I’ve gotten to the part about the veil we found.”

“Interesting?”

“Yuck.”

“All right, I don’t want to know.”

“But between all the sex stuff, you can tell she really was struggling. Caught between two men, a husband she loves and a man with whom she is sexually obsessed. She hasn’t decided yet what to do. It’s like she has to work it out on the page first. Are you going to read it?”

“Absolutely not. I’ve had enough experience with her writing to last me.”

“But see, V, I was right about her all along, wasn’t I?”

Yes, the notebooks for which Alura Straczynski had been desperately searching, the missing pieces of her solipsistic opus, were in the locker, along with all kinds of other stuff of varying levels of interest for me – a college yearbook, a fencing trophy, a Leica camera, snapshots of friends, a financial ledger, the yucky silk veil, a book of selected poems by Lord Byron, and a how-to book, a cheap-looking paperback from a publishing company called Loompanics Unlimited.

I had taken a special interest in the snapshots. Barbecues, parties, days at the beach, a lot of good-looking young folk having a rich old time. Most of the people in the pictures I had never seen before, but I did recognize a few, absolutely. Lonnie, poor dead Lonnie, here much younger but still with the beard and the motorcycle style, gazing at Chelsea, lovely Chelsea, with her arm around a man I recognized from the photo Mrs. Greeley had given me. Was that the triangle that took Tommy down? Or was it the other triangle, the one Kimberly was reading about in the notebooks? There was also a picture of Sylvia Steinberg, young, thin, absolutely stunning, her gaze cast not at the camera or her boyfriend but at Chelsea. There was a stiff shot of Jackson Straczynski, posed and serious in a suit, his hair long, his tie thick. There was a strange man, short, dark, husky, whose image was ubiquitous in the photographs. His dark eyes burned at the camera even as his mouth attempted a smile. The other partner, Cooper Prod, I assumed. And in almost every shot, of course, there was Tommy Greeley himself, standing tall, smiling slyly, the life of the party. But the party was running out of time.

The objects in the tool locker spelled out with utter clarity the last desperate days of Tommy Greeley. His drug empire was collapsing, the dogged Telushkin was doggedly pursuing him, indictments were as certain as the sunrise. Tommy Greeley, in the midst of a torrid affair with his best friend’s wife, had decided on a drastic course of action. That Loompanics book we found was entitled How to Disappear and Never Be Found, and for Tommy it had provided a blueprint. He would run away, run away with her, take what money he could and start a new life as someone else, still rich, but now out from under the shadow of his criminal past. He was always one for slipping out of trouble, had said his father. Chapter Four of How to Disappear and Never Be Found: “Creating a New Identity.”

Eddie Dean.

That was the possibility that appeared to me from a great distance at my father’s bedside. That was what my query to California was all about, to see if there ever was a real Eddie Dean and, if there was, to learn whether he had died an untimely death, leaving a birth certificate and Social Security number for an old friend to use in making his escape, just as explained in Chapter Four. But if that was the case, how had Tommy Greeley survived his encounter with Joey Cheaps? I had a theory about that too.

Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be able to show Joey Parma or Derek Manley the picture I now had of Tommy Greeley. Joey Parma had told me he had killed the man with the suitcase and so I had assumed that he had killed Tommy Greeley. But what if it wasn’t Tommy Greeley holding the suitcase. What if he had gotten wind of the betrayal and given the suitcase to someone else to hold, had set someone else up to take the beating? Maybe he had learned something that made him suspicious, maybe he had been hiding, using the other to make sure it was safe. How characteristic of our Tommy Greeley would that be?

There was no proof. He could have told his friend Eddie Dean about the locker sent up to Boston. The allergy to fish might be a coincidence. He could have arranged for his special gift to be sent to his mother every Christmas before his murder, the twenty bottles of gin representing the bitterness carried like a seething wound in his breast. There was no proof, but if Tommy was truly killed at the edge of the Delaware River, then who had been using Tommy Greeley’s past to wreak his revenge?

“How did Colfax know about the stuff Tommy gave Jimmy?” said Kimberly.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“Maybe it was just someone else with a British accent. There are a lot of those in the world.”

“Do you really think that’s it?”

“I don’t know, V. I don’t understand anything.”

I hadn’t told Kimberly about my suspicions. She was too close to Eddie Dean, she would tip my hand. I thought it better to get the proof from California first, and then let the police handle it, but still I had my concerns. “I want you to be careful, Kimberly. Very careful.”

She turned to stare at me.

“Let’s just assume,” I said, “we don’t know anything about anybody. It’s safer that way. Have you thought any more on why you got this job?”

“Maybe they saw something in the interview.”

“Maybe they did.”

“I have talents.”

“I’m not saying you’re not qualified. Or that you’re not doing a great job. And I’m not saying that if they were picking on looks alone you wouldn’t have snagged it easy, being you are fabulous-looking, no doubt about it. But I want you to be careful.”

“What do you think is going on?”

“I’m not sure. Not yet, at least, though soon I will be, you can count on it. But believe me when I tell you this, there is something not right going on and it is rooted in the past and it is going to end very very badly.”

“So, V,” said Kimberly, her eyes turning suddenly bright. “You really think I look fabulous?”

“Absolutely,” I said, and her bright smile at my compliment was both touching and a little sad.

She went back to her reading and I began to think about her. Why again had she been hired? What did she know that Eddie Dean, a stranger with a mangled face who had the same allergy to fish as had Tommy Greeley, would find valuable? I looked at her again, saw again the same angles and lines of the pictures on my wall. She was reading Alura Straczynski’s journal and so in my mind’s eye she was somehow taking on Alura Straczynski’s shape. Look at her, the way her neck stretched, look at the shape of her ear, look at her hand, sitting on the page, the way it curled, the length of its fingers, the shape of its thumb. I had seen it before, I had a picture of that very same hand.