I smiled at him.

“I am he,” I said.

Conroy stared at me and opened his mouth and thought about what he was going to say and decided not to say it and closed his mouth. Then he thought of something else.

“Fuck you,” he said.

He stood abruptly and walked through the food court and out into the mall. I got up and strolled into the mall after him. At the far end I saw Vinnie Morris come out of a music store wearing a Walkman and earphones. He went out through the mall door onto the street ahead of Conroy. After Conroy went out, Hawk stopped window-shopping and drifted out after him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

“You seem down,” I said to Susan. “Would you like me to have sex with you and brighten up your week?”

She shook her head. We were at a small table in the high-ceilinged bar at the Hotel Meridien. I had beer. Susan was barely touching a cosmopolitan.

“That’s the answer everybody gives me,” I said.

“The parents of the boy who committed suicide are suing me,” Susan said.

“They blame you,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I guess they’d probably have to,” I said.

“I know.”

“You’ve seen a lawyer?”

“I talked with Rita.”

“Rita? I thought you didn’t trust Rita.”

“I don’t trust her with you,” Susan said. “I think she’s a good lawyer.”

“She is,” I said. “And a big firm like Cone Oakes has a lot of resources.”

Susan smiled without much pleasure. “So I’m employing Rita,” Susan said. “And she’s employing you.”

“What’s she say about the lawsuit?”

“She feels it’s groundless.”

The Hotel Meridien was in a building that had once been a bank. The bar was in a room where they probably used to keep the money. The ornate ceiling looked fifty feet high.

“How do you feel?”

“I feel guilty.”

I ate a few peanuts. Eating a few peanuts was not easy. Mostly, I tended to eat them all.

“Be surprising if you didn’t,” I said.

“I know. I know the guilty feeling comes from my reaction to the event. Not the event itself.”

“Still feels bad, though,” I said.

“Yes.”

I ate a few more peanuts, and determined to eat no more. The waitress brought me a second beer. Susan took in a milligram of her drink.

“You know what makes me love you?” she said.

“My manliness?”

She smiled.

“You haven’t tried to talk me out of feeling guilty,” she said.

“Be aimless,” I said.

“Yes. But not everyone would know that.”

“It’s a gift,” I said.

I could almost see Susan decide that she had been down as much as she was prepared to be.

“Tell me about what’s going on in that case you’re working on for Rita.”

“It keeps spreading out on me,” I said. “The more I investigate, the more I learn. And the more I learn, the more I don’t know what’s going on.”

“That happens to me often in therapy,” Susan said. “I know something’s in there in the dark and I keep groping for it.”

“That would be me,” I said. “Groping.”

“What do you know?”

“I know that Smith is dead. I know that I talked to a woman at his bank and she got fired and now she’s dead.”

“How did she die?”

“Appears to be suicide,” I said.

“But?”

“But she had just been to a lawyer about a gender discrimination lawsuit against the bank,” I said.

“So why would she be making long-range plans just before killing herself?”

“Yes.”

“It happens sometimes,” Susan said. “It is an attempt to convince themselves of the future.”

I shrugged and had a Brazil nut that I plucked out from among the remaining peanuts. One Brazil nut wouldn’t hurt anything.

“The bank was a family-owned business, until Marvin Conroy came aboard. He fired the woman for incompetence. And he doesn’t want to talk with me. I know that some people from Soldiers Field Development Limited are interested in what I’m doing and want me to stop doing it. I talked with Smith’s broker and was assaulted shortly thereafter.”

“Assaulted?”

“Yeah. They weren’t very good at it.”

“That’s nice,” Susan said.

“DeRosa, the guy that says Mary Smith wanted him to kill her husband, is represented by Ann Kiley, Bobby Kiley’s daughter.”

“The defense lawyer?”

“Yes. The firm is Kiley and Harbaugh, but it’s really Kiley and Kiley. Father and daughter.”

“That’s sort of charming,” Susan said.

“It is,” I said. “But why is a firm like that representing a stiff like DeRosa?”

“Social conscience?”

“You bet,” I said. “And then we have Mary Smith herself. She still seems to have a relationship of some sort with an old high school boyfriend who is evasive when asked about it.”

“By you.”

“By me.”

“And what did he say?”

“As I recall,” I said, “he told me to ”shove fucking off.“”

“She must have been attracted to him by his silver tongue,” Susan said. “What does Mary say?”

“You’d have to talk with Mary to understand,” I said.

“Why? What’s she like?”

I found another Brazil nut in the dish, and a cashew. I ate both of them. I hadn’t seen the cashew before.

“She’s a living testament to the power of dumb.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you ask her something and she seems too dumb to answer it. You can’t catch her in contradictions because she doesn’t seem aware of them even after they’re pointed out.”

“Seems kind of smart to me,” Susan said.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think she knows she’s dumb and sort of uses it.”

“Maximizing her potential,” Susan said. “Anything else bothering you?”

“Yeah. Nathan Smith. He was unmarried until he married Mary, in his fifties. According to Mary, he was a friend and helper to a number of young men, both prior to and during his marriage to her.”

“If he were gay, would he have hidden it? This is not a closeted age.”

“Old Yankee family. President of the family bank.”

“Still,” Susan said.

“Remember your patient,” I said.

“He was a boy. And he was very troubled.”

“Nathan Smith was once a boy.”

Susan nodded.

“Of course,” she said.

“It’s something I’ve got to look into.”

“Because you think it would have bearing on his death?”

“Suze, I don’t have a goddamned clue what has a bearing on his death. Every time I find a rock I turn it over.”

We sat quiet for a time. She held her partially sipped cosmopolitan in both hands, looking at its pink surface.

“It bothers you that the woman from the bank died.”

“She came to me and told me about getting fired,” I said. “She said she was afraid of Conroy, the new CEO.”

“And you feel you should have protected her?”

I shrugged.

“S.” Susan’s eyes were very big as she looked up at me over the glass. “You’re feeling a little guilty, too.”

“Yep.”

“And, like me, you know that it’s not rational.”

“Just like you,” I said.

“I think you’ve never quite altogether forgiven yourself for that woman in Los Angeles all that time ago.”

“Candy Sloan,” I said.

Susan nodded.

“Only time I ever cheated on you,” I said.

“Makes it that much worse, doesn’t it?” Susan said.

“I’m not sure it makes any difference,” I said.

Susan smiled the smile she used when she knew I was wrong but planned to let me get away with it.

“It’s frustrating to have so many questions,” Susan said.

“It gives me a lot of handholds,” I said. “I keep groping long enough I’ll get hold of an answer.”

“Yes,” Susan said. “You will.”

“You too,” I said.

Susan smiled at me.

“We persist,” she said.

The waitress came to ask if we needed anything. Susan shook her head. I ordered another beer.

“And another bowl of nuts,” I said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Race Witherspoon opened his studio door for me looking as if he had just ingested a fat canary. He had the collar of his silk shirt turned up and the brim of a summer straw hat tilted forward over his eyes.