"I keep asking everyone. You're just the one that's here."

"Well, I find it very boring," Rikki Wu said.

"Okay. We'll turn our attention to more exciting stuff," I said.

"Would you like to see me do a one-armed pushup?"

"Can you really do that?" she said.

"As many as you'd like."

She relaxed. We were back in the realm of the physical. This was her turf.

"You must be very strong," she said.

"But pure," I said.

"And kind-hearted."

"Perhaps you will show me sometime, when we are not in so public a place."

"I could meet you at the gym," I said.

She frowned. Maybe I wasn't as funny as I thought I was. Or maybe she didn't have much sense of humor. Probably a Chinese thing. I ate some dim sum. She drank some tea. The dim sum wasn't very good. But there was plenty of it.

"Do you work out?" she said.

"Sure," I said.

"I do too. Do you have a trainer?"

"No, I muddle through on my own."

"I have two," she said.

"My CV specialist, and Ronny, my strength and conditioning coach."

"CV?"

"Cardiovascular," she said.

"I train with them every day."

"Well, it seems to be working," I said.

"Yes. You should see my body," she said.

"Yes, I should."

She laughed. It wasn't an embarrassed laugh. But it was an uneasy one, as if she feared her own sexuality and where it might lead her. She stood. For lunch she had consumed two cups of green tea. I stood.

"I have to go to my body-sculpting class," she said.

"Sometime you must show me that pushup."

"One arm," I said.

"Ask Ronny if he can do that."

She laughed. I gave her my card.

"You think of anything useful, call me," I said.

"Perhaps I will," she said.

The waiter appeared with her coat and held it while she put it on.

"Lunch is taken care of," she said.

She turned and walked to the door. The waiter followed her, and when she got to the door, he opened it, and popped her umbrella open and held it over her head until she took the handle from him and walked out. I'm not sure she ever saw the waiter.

CHAPTER 12

It was a bright day in Concord. The sky above the old house was the kind of bright blue that you see in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. The sun was strong and pleasant and the foliage was turning color.

The grounds around the house seemed to have been landscaped by Tarzan of the apes. Bushes, vines, saplings, weeds, decorative plantings run amok, all looped and sagged around the house, clustered in front of it, clung to it, and concealed far too much of it.

"This is ugly," Susan said. She had on jeans, and sneakers, and a lavender tee shirt with the sleeves cut off. Sweat had darkened the tee shirt. Sweat ran down her face under the long billed Postrio baseball cap. A sheen of sweat defined the small, hard muscles in her forearms.

"They'd never recognize you at Bergdorf s," I said.

She paid no attention, focusing as she always did on the question before her. She was wearing tan leather work gloves and carrying an axe.

"We need a chain saw," Susan said.

"Jesus," I said.

"You don't think I can handle a chain saw?"

"They're sort of dangerous," I said.

"If I weren't totally fearless, I'd be a little afraid of chain saws."

"Well, it would speed things up," she said.

"What's the hurry? We have the rest of our life to do this."

"You know perfectly well that I am always in a hurry."

"Almost always," I said.

"Except then."

Pearl came galloping up the slope from the stream, and jumped up with both feet on Susan's chest. Susan leaned forward so that Pearl could lap her face, which Pearl did vigorously. Susan squinched and endured the lapping until Pearl spotted a squirrel and dropped down and stalked it.

"God, wasn't that awful," Susan said.

"You might tell her not to do that," I said.

"She likes to do that," Susan said.

The squirrel zipped up a tree, and when it was safely out of reach, Pearl dashed at it and jumped up with her forepaws against the tree gazing after it.

"You think she'd actually eat the squirrel?" Susan said.

"She eats everything else she finds," I said.

Susan took a big swing with her axe at the base of a tree-sized shrub. What she lacked in technique, she made up in vigor, and I decided not to mention that she swung like a girl. I went back inside and worked on demolishing the back stairs with a three pound sledge and a crowbar.

I had a radio playing jazz in the kitchen. Pearl moseyed around in the fenced-in fields finding disgusting things to roll in. She came back periodically to show off her new smell, negotiating the debris with easy dignity. I could see Susan through the front windows.

She had her axe, her long-handled clippers, her bow saw, and her machete. She hacked and cut and clipped and sawed and stopped periodically to haul the cuttings into a big pile for pickup. Her tee shirt was dark with sweat. But, she was, I knew, tireless. For all of her self-mocking parody of the Jewish American Princess, she loved to work. And was rarely more happy than when she was fully engaged.

I got the crowbar under one edge of the lath and plaster wall and pried away a big chunk, exposing one of the stair stringers. With the three-pound sledge I knocked the stringer loose and the stairs canted slowly and then came down with a satisfying crash.

This is a lot better, I thought, than trying to find who killed Craig Sampson.

CHAPTER 13

I was in my office with my feet up, drinking coffee from a paper cup and reading "Doonesbury." Behind me, two stories down, on Berkeley Street, tourists, brightly lit by the October sun, were posing with the teddy bear sculpture outside F. A. O. Schwarz. I finished "Doonesbury" and watched the photography for a moment, speculating on the tendency of tourists to be larger than their wardrobes. I was able to reach no conclusion about that, so I gave up and turned to the sports page to read "Tank McNamara." I was rereading it to make sure I'd missed no hidden meaning when my door opened and in came three Asian guys. The door opened straight onto the corridor. I had no waiting room. I'd had one once in another location and no one had ever waited in it. One Private Eye. No Waiting. I folded the paper and put it down on the desk and said hello.

The tallest one did the talking.

"You're Mister Spenser?" he said.

"Yeah."

"My name is Lonnie Wu," he said.

"I believe you know my wife."

"Rikki," I said.

"Yes."

Lonnie Wu was maybe 5' 10" and slim. He had polished black hair combed straight back, and a small, neat black moustache. He was wearing a gray cashmere jacket with a big red picture frame plaid in it that fitted him as if they had grown up together, and probably cost more than my whole wardrobe. He wore a black silk shirt buttoned to the neck, and black slacks, and black loafers that were shinier than his hair.

"Have a seat," I said.

He coiled fluently into my client chair. There was only one. He said something to the two guys who'd come with him, and they stood against the wall on either side of my office door. I opened the right-hand top drawer of my desk a little.