Mrs Pickering sat erect in her chair, not shrinking back or shrinking down, and yet, she no longer seemed to take up the same space in this room. The woman was subdued to a tired nod as she fumbled in her purse for her checkbook. So Mrs Pickering was all facade, and not the makings of the blue-ribbon bitch Mallory had first taken her for.

"My mother's name is Fabia Penwofth," she said as she signed the check with the weak stroke of a gold pen, and then drew a small white card from her purse. "This is her address."

Mallory accepted the check and the card. She gave the woman her hand to say that a deal was done, a gesture any stranger might have mistaken for warmth. "Thank you, Mrs Pickering."

Mrs Pickering smiled in near shyness, stripped now to the mere human bones of a middle-aged matron out of her depth.

"Call me Marion, dear. And you are…?"

"Mallory."

Mrs Pickering rose from her chair and walked to the door with a slow deep grace. And now Mallory guessed the ballet background. Mrs Pickering's toes were turned out, and her carriage came from training. Her mood should have bowed her head or slumped her shoulders, had not some fiend of a dancing master with a big staff beaten that body language out of her at an early age. A similar experiment had failed with Mallory.

Charles looked rather unhappy. As the door closed, he swiveled his chair to face her. "What are you doing in Gramercy Park every day?"

She rounded her killer-green eyes ringed with thick lashes that now dropped slowly to veil seductively, and when her eyes widened again, it was a striptease. All that protected him from her was the fact that she was twenty-five and wonderful to look at, while he was thirty-nine and could not imagine why she would have any but a platonic interest in him. He was logical to a fault.

Sensing the seduction had no effect, she looked down at her red fingernails as if they might not be perfectly aligned.

"Talk to me."

"I'm working on spec. It's something related."

"Kathleen." In those two syllables, there was only a gentle suggestion that she might be lying through her teeth.

"Mallory," she corrected him. "There is a con game going on in Gramercy," she said in the tone of "I am not lying". Though they both knew she was. But Charles was such a gentleman, wasn't he. "I recognized the medium from a rap-sheet description."

"And it's nothing to do with Louis's murder." And the sun came up twice this morning, said his eyes.

"No."

"I'm worried about you. You would tell me if you were mixed up in that business, wouldn't you?" And the earth might altogether stop revolving around the sun for an hour or so when that happened.

"Oh sure. Why not?"

Why not? She was genuinely fond of him. If a lie would make him feel better, she wouldn't hesitate. She liked him that much.

"So you're only interested in the medium." And I, Charles Butler, am Queen of the May, said the shrug of his shoulders.

"The medium is into computer scams. Not a genius programmer, but she knows her way around the information networks. Just like the old con artist in 3B."

"What?"

"Edith Candle, the old woman upstairs in 3B. She has the same setup. Computer services for news clippings and research, magazines from all over the planet, a credit-check service."

"So you ran a background check on Edith. Please leave the tenants alone from now on. I'd rather you didn't invade their privacy. And there's nothing suspicious about Edith's information network."

"Sure."

"She hasn't left this building in more than thirty years, not since the year her husband died."

"I never said she wasn't nuts. I just said it's the same setup Pickering's medium had the last time she was arrested."

"Edith is a recluse, but she hasn't left the race. She uses information networks to stay in contact with the world. She can probably tell you more about what's going on out there than people who live out of doors. And the credit-check service goes with the territory of being a landlord. It's all quite harmless."

"But she's not a landlord anymore, and her subscription is up to date. It's been – what? – a year since you bought the building? And why would a multimillionaire want to hole up in a Soho apartment?"

"Edith made a reasonable fortune but nothing in the multimillions. There wasn't even a quarter-million profit in the building. It was refinanced a few years – Sorry, I forget who I'm talking to. I assume you do know the exact amount of the mortgage?"

Of course she did.

"Charles, she's got more money than God. She's a stock-market freak. Did you know she had a rap sheet with the Securities and Exchange Commission?"

"What? No, scratch that. I don't want to know."

"Insider trading. I've got all the documentation on it."

"Oh, well then, it must be true if you've seen it in black and white." He threw up his hands and stared at the ceiling for a moment. His sarcasm lacked acidity, and she sometimes had to strain to catch the false notes. He went into the inner pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out his wallet.

"Let me shake your faith in all-holy documentation." He fished out his driver's license and dropped it on the desk in front of her. "Look at that. It says I was born on the twenty-sixth. My birth certificate says the same thing. The doctor was tired after sixteen hours of a difficult delivery. He put down the wrong date. So much for documentation."

"She was served with a subpoena. The SEC filed a formal order of investigation."

"I don't want to hear any more of this."

"Why not? I pulled this stuff out of the US Attorney's office. That makes it credible. You want to see the printouts?"

"No!"

She had only meant to sidetrack him and now she had gone too far. It was rare to see him angry. Once before, they'd had a conversation on his aversion to invasion of privacy. She hadn't been able to make sense of it then, either, thought him deficient and handicapped, offered to straighten him out. And she could do that, she had implied then. He had come to the right place -

"I didn't mean to yell." His voice softened. "Let's try it again, shall we? Everything you learn about people redefines your relationship with them. I've known Edith since I was a child. Her husband was my father's cousin. She's all the family I have left. I don't need to know any more about her than I do."

"So you don't want to know about the insider trading." 'No!… Sorry… Suppose someone came to you and told you something unpleasant about Louis or Helen?"

"Okay. Enough," she said.

No, he didn't think so. That much was in his eyes. Too pat an answer, entirely too easy. She would have to watch that in the future.

They said their strained good-nights to one another in the hall. She walked to the elevator and pressed the button. The doors opened on the startled face of Herbert Mandrel. His small head jerked in the way of a bird startled by the sudden display of Mallory's perfect teeth. He looked to the ceiling and walls, evaluating the limited number of exits in an elevator, and then moved as far to the rear as he could go without leaving an indent on the back wall. As the doors closed and the elevator began its slow ascent, he was puffing out his bird's chest and standing a little straighter, as though this might buy him the inches he needed to look her in the eye.

She noted the army fatigue jacket and a familiar bulge at his side. His hand moved to cover it, but too late. She was smiling down on him as she reached out to tap the red button to stop the elevator at the third floor.

The cords in his neck were bulging. He would not meet her eyes when she brought her face very close to his and said softly, "You watch a lot of television, don't you, Herbert? Cop shows, things like that? If I told you to assume the position, would you know what I meant?" Now he did meet her eyes, and the little bird's chest was deflating. He rallied, puffing out once more, eyebrows knitting together, preamble to a New York attitude of get out of my face. "You have no authority to – "