I said, "It's a mere formality, but I have to ask you something." There are no formalities in criminal investigations, incidentally.

She stared at me without comment.

"Can you think of anyone who would want or who would benefit from Cliff being dead?"

"You bet I can." She looked me in the eye. "Me-I wanted that bastard deader than a doornail." She inquired, after a moment, "Would you happen to know if he kept up his insurance payments? The kids are beneficiaries. We could sure as hell use the money."

Bian coughed.

A moment passed during which Theresa and I never broke eye contact. I said, "You mentioned coffee."

This seemed to amuse her and she chuckled. "I was just making a pot. Join me in the kitchen. It wouldn't be good for your careers if your key suspect escaped out the window."

"You're not a suspect, Mrs. Daniels." Yet.

There was a long silence, then she said, "Don't be so sure of yourself."

CHAPTER EIGHT

On that auspicious note, we rose and followed her through the dining room and into the kitchen, essentially a narrow strip, about six feet in length and three feet in width, with old, scarred white cabinetry on both sides. The floor was a checkerboard of scuffed black-and-white vinyl squares, and the counters were some kind of awful lime green plasterboard. Aside from a few appliances and the occupants, since about 1950 the kitchen looked frozen in time.

We all three somehow shuffled and squeezed into the narrow space. Theresa stood by the sink where an asthmatic drip coffeemaker coughed and spit its last drops into a dungy glass beaker. I counted three plants-all withered into gnarled brown papyrus, which seemed to me to be appropriate decorations for the house, and its owner.

Theresa asked us, "Do either of you take cream or sugar?"

"Both, please," I replied. Bian and I traded uneasy glances. I mean, this woman had just been notified that the man she had shared her life with for thirty-three years-slept with, bred and raised two children with-now was in the morgue. No, I hadn't expected her to wail or yank her hair or anything. But neither had I expected such chilling indifference, and I wondered if it was exaggerated, a defense mechanism or something else.

Whatever had soured this marriage must've been catastrophic- but was it enough to pump a bullet through her ex's head? She seemed to want us to believe that she did, but was that the truth or a perverse case of wishful thinking?

Theresa reached into the fridge and pulled out a carton of half-and-half, then opened a cabinet and withdrew a bowl of sugar so old it had metastasized into white granite. She poured two cups and handed them to Bian and me.

While I added half-and-half and made a big mess trying to chip off a spoonful of sugar, Theresa looked away from us and mentioned, "I need a little sherry to settle my stomach."

She stepped out for a moment. When she returned, in her hand was a tall cocktail glass filled to the lip with ice cubes and some blend of sherry that was peculiarly colorless. She said, "I'm sure it won't bother you if I smoke."

A cigarette was already dangling from her lips, spewing pollution into the tiny room.

"Do you mind discussing Cliff?" I asked her, stirring my coffee. "It helps when the investigators know something about the victim."

"Shouldn't you begin by asking where I was around midnight last night?" I took that for a yes.

So I asked her.

"Where I am every night." She laughed. "David Letterman is my alibi. Why don't you quiz me on his top ten?"

I smiled. This was getting weird.

Bian allowed a moment to pass, then said, "I'm not sure how to ask this."

"Just ask." She shrugged and added, "If I don't like your question, you won't get an answer."

"Fair enough. What made your marriage fail? In the wedding picture over the mantel… your expressions… you seemed to be in love once."

"The official grounds, the cause my lawyer filed, was infidelity." She added, "There was enough of that. Near the end. But that's only the superficial reason."

I don't really like to start a story at the end, so I asked, "How did you two meet?"

"At Fort Meade, in the late sixties. My father was a colonel working in the post headquarters. Cliff was a buck sergeant, an Arabic and Farsi linguist. I was young, eighteen, and I used to hang out at the NCO club. Officers' kids aren't supposed to mingle with enlisted soldiers, but I was too young for the officers and it was… I suppose… a way of thumbing my nose at my father. It was the sixties, after all. Everybody back then was dropping acid and screwing perfect strangers. I flirted with enlisted soldiers." She emitted a smoker's hack and took a long gulp of "sherry." "We dated. A few months later he asked me to marry him."

"It sounds like you were swept off your feet," Bian commented.

"Yes. I suppose I was. I loved Cliff. He was… back then… intelligent, kind, ambitious… not much to look at, but as you're going to learn, he could be very charming…" Also he could pole vault over tall buildings with his third leg, but she didn't mention it. Neither did I.

And so on, for the next twenty minutes, Theresa described what sounded like an ideal beginning, an ideal marriage, an ideal life.

Cliff completed his tour in the Army and happily took his discharge. His next step, due to his Army intelligence experience and language competencies, was to apply for a position in the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, where he was immediately accepted. Theresa worked administrative jobs for about ten years to add extra bucks to the kitty, Cliff and Theresa bought this house, the biological clock began wheezing-bang, bang-two wonderful kids, she quit working, became a Kool-Aid mom, and so on. By the numbers, the American dream in the making.

On the professional side, Cliff was bright, hardworking, diligent, and highly regarded by his bosses; in the early years, promotions and step raises came through like clockwork. Ultimately, however, the role of DIA is support for our warfighters, and during the cold war the action was with Sovietologists and Kremlinologists; the Middle East was a strategic backwater and Arabists ended up with their noses pressed against a glass ceiling. According to Theresa, by the time Cliff awoke to the unhappy reality that he had a big career problem, he was in his early forties, too late to change his specialty or his professional fate.

As she spoke, we occasionally interrupted to ask for a point of clarification, or to steer her back on track. She had become chatty, and it was clear she needed to talk about this, not cathartically, I thought, but more as somebody indulging a tale they now knew ended on a satisfying note.

At times her narrative was chronological and organized, at times free-flowing and disconnected. Theresa frequently paused to light a fresh cigarette, and she twice left the kitchen to refresh her "sherry." It was late afternoon; at the rate she was "refreshing," she would be in the cups before dinnertime.

As a general rule, incidentally, I never put ex-wives on the stand. They make awful witnesses. They cannot recite the past objectively- they know their Sir Galahad on the shimmering white steed turned out to be a self-indulgent cad riding a fetid pig.

Yet, if I listened carefully, I was starting to form a picture of this man who died so weirdly in his bed the night before.

Cliff was raised in a small upstate New York town, father a garage mechanic, one brother, one sister. A local parish priest saw a young boy with spunk and intelligence and awarded him a free ticket through the local parish school. Cliff became the only one from his family to matriculate from high school, then college-to wit, Colgate-doing it the hard way-on brains, sleep deprivation, part-time jobs, and desperation. As with so many young men of his era, no sooner had the sheepskin greased his palm than Uncle Sam intervened to borrow a few years of his life. He was sent first to the Defense Language Institute at Monterey, where he mastered Arabic, then Farsi, followed by an assignment to a military intelligence center, at Fort Meade, Maryland, which, for sure, beat the alternative enjoyed by so many of his hapless peers-humping a ninety-pound ruck in the boonies of Southeast Asia.