"About five or six months ago, just before Thanksgiving. That's when Carla found out. She kicked him out for a couple of weeks then. I didn't think he was ever coming back. But he did. She asked him back. If it were me, I don't think I'd have forgiven…well, but that's me."

"But Mr. Markham did come back?"

Mrs. Tong nodded. "Swearing it was over, of course."

"But it wasn't?"

"I don't know." Now, a shrug. "Carla wasn't sure, I don't think. But she thought…She told the coffee group she was getting a private investigator, and if he was seeing her again, she was leaving him." A silence settled for a long moment, after which Mrs. Tong turned to Glitsky and picked up the thread. "So when I heard Dr. Kensing had been here last night, you're right, I was surprised."

Feigning a nonchalance he didn't feel, Glitsky leaned back and folded his arms over his chest. The information about Ann Kensing and Tim Markham made him reconsider two contradictory possibilities: first, that Mrs. Markham might have been depressed for a long while before last night, which would strengthen the argument for murder/ suicide; but second, here was an apparent possible motive for a murder.

He would consider each more carefully when he got some time, but for now he had one more line of questioning for the maid. "As far as you know, Mrs. Tong, did Dr. Kensing know about the relationship between Mr. Markham and his wife?"

"I think so, yes. When Carla heard that they were getting divorced-"

"Kensing and Ann? They're divorced now, too? Over this?"

"I don't know if it's final yet, but I understood that they'd separated. At least when Carla heard they'd started the proceedings, she tried to make sure Mr. Markham wouldn't get named in any of the papers. So Dr. Kensing, he must have known, don't you think?"

9

Dismas Hardy was standing on the sidewalk on Irving Street talking with another lawyer named Wes Farrell. The two men had only met once or twice before, but the most recent time had been at Glitsky's wedding last September, where they'd independently and then together explored the limits of human tolerance for champagne. It was, it turned out for both of them, pretty high.

Last night, Frannie had eventually shown up at the Shamrock, and she and Hardy had gone on their date-Chinese food at the Purple Yet Wah. When they got home, he couldn't get McGuire's story about Shane Mackey out of his head. This morning, he'd called around and discovered that Mackey's family had indeed hired an attorney-Farrell-to explore malpractice issues surrounding his death. After all the medical talk recently, then Tim Markham's death yesterday, he was curious to know more. Farrell would be a good source of information. He could also, he knew, be a hell of a good time. So when Wes got to his office at a little after 8:30, Hardy was standing outside on the sidewalk, holding a bottle of bubbly with a ribbon around it.

Farrell greeted him like a long-lost brother, but then, seeing the offering, backed away in mock horror. "I don't think I've had a sip of that stuff since Abe's wedding, which is okay since I had about a year's worth that day if I recall, which I'm not sure I do."

"It's like riding a horse," Hardy said. "You've got to get right back on after it bucks you off. Churchill drank it every day, you know? For breakfast. And he won the Nobel Prize."

"For champagne drinking?"

Hardy shook his head. "Peace, I think. No, wait a minute. Maybe literature."

"It would have been good if it was peace." Farrell turned to let Hardy in past him. "I love how they wind up giving the Peace Prize to these world-class warriors. Henry Kissinger. Le Duc Tho. Yasser Arafat. Churchill would have fit right in. These guys aren't exactly Gandhi, you know."

"Statesmen," Hardy said. "If you're a statesman you can kill as many people as you want as long as you're in a war, and then when you stop, everybody in Sweden is so grateful they give you the Peace Prize."

"Except for the fact that Sweden doesn't give the Peace Prize."

"It doesn't? Who does?"

"Norway."

"When did that start?"

"Pretty early on, I think. All the other Nobel's come from Sweden, but Norway gives the Peace Prize. Don't ask me why?"

"They're probably better statesmen," Hardy said.

"I could be a statesman," Farrell said. "I'd like to kill lots of people." He was sitting now, rearranging the pens on his blotter. "Maybe then I could defend myself, which would mean I had a client."

Hardy sat back and crossed an ankle over his knee. "Things a little slow lately?"

Farrell waved a hand vaguely at their surroundings. "Barely worth opening the office every day." He sighed. "If I didn't care so much about a couple of my clients…"

"The Mackeys, for example?"

Farrell's shoulders fell. He wagged his head back and forth a couple of times in despair, then looked up through bassett eyes. "Don't tell me they came to you?"

Hardy barked a note of laughter, then checked it. Losing business wasn't a laughing matter. "No," he said. "I promise. I'm not stealing your clients, Wes. But it is about the Mackeys."

"What about them, besides that they've not only lost a son, but are screwed to boot?"

"Screwed how?"

"Because our great Supreme Court recently ruled, as you may have heard, that individuals can't sue their HMOs for medical malpractice because they don't practice medicine. They're business entities, not medical entities." He spread his palms, lifted, then dropped them in frustration. "Unfortunately, Diz, this rejects more or less exactly the argument I'd filed in behalf of the Mackeys and my other five clients. And master of timing that I am, I hitched my wagon pretty much full-time to this issue, figuring it was the wave of the future. Anyway, so now I've got to rewrite all the pleading on some new cause of action. Failure to coordinate care, general negligence, the admin of the plan caused the P.I., like that. But meanwhile, there's no billings."

All the way back in his chair, Hardy sat with his arms crossed, halfway enjoying the rave. He knew the realities of billing. If you couldn't handle them, you didn't belong in the business. "So what happened with Shane?"

"Shane is like textbook." Farrell shot up and went to his file cabinet, from which he pulled a thick folder. "Look at this. Check this out."

Hardy stood and came over to the desk. Farrell had the medical records of everything that Moses McGuire had described in the Shamrock the previous night, but they went over it in a lot more detail, and with a final twist that made Shane Mackey's death even more tragic. One of Shane's doctors suggested that he might, possibly, have "something" that could respond to a new treatment being performed at Cedars-Sinai in L.A. But Shane's HMO had determined that this treatment was "experimental," so they would not cover him. Which meant the cost to Shane would be about three hundred thousand dollars out of pocket. "And after months of agony, trying to decide if he should incur the cost, he went for it. He and his parents sold their houses, basically cashed out, and he went down to L.A., where guess what?"

"He died," Hardy said soberly.

"He died," Farrell repeated. "But I've got a witness down there who says that if he would have come in three months earlier, they might have saved him."

Hardy whistled. "If he's credible, that could be worth a lot of money for you."

"Yeah, but it's not coming in tomorrow, let me tell you." Farrell closed the folder. "Anyway, the bad part for me is that it's all omission, very hard to prove. Stuff somebody might have or should have done, but didn't because Parnassus doesn't allow-"

Hardy straightened up, nearly jumped at the word. "Parnassus? That's the group here we're talking about?"