“How’s your lawsuit?” I said.

“I think the insurance company plans to settle,” Susan said.

“Thus leaving you neither vindicated nor convicted.”

“But they’ll probably cancel afterwards,” she said.

“Insurance companies are fun,” I said. “Aren’t they.”

Susan nodded. She dipped into her coffee, her big eyes gazing at the road across the top of the cup.

“And the boy is still dead,” she said.

“And it’s still not your fault,” I said.

She was quiet, her face still half hidden by the coffee. In the backseat Pearl snored occasionally, the way she had begun to do as she got older.

“Fault has little to do with sadness,” Susan said. “One of the things that helps kids get through the difficulty of being a gay adolescent is to have someone. I don’t mean a shrink. But a friend, a lover, someone. But the thing they need help with prevents them from getting it.”

“Because they’re too conflicted about being homosexual,” I said.

“I hate that word,” Susan said into her cup.

“Homosexual?”

“Yes.”

“Too clinical?”

“Makes me think of grim men in lab coats,” Susan said. “Studying a pathology.”

I had nothing to say about that, and decided in this case to try saying nothing. Susan drank her coffee. I drank mine.

“Where’s Hawk?” Susan said.

“I thought we’d have Sunday alone together.”

“Except for the baby.”

“Except for her.”

“Is it safe?”

“Even without Hawk,” I said, “I am not an amateur.”

“True,” Susan said. “Have you ever considered that your person might have been suicidal?”

“Nathan Smith?”

“Yes. A closeted gay man. Trying to pretend.”

“There was no gun,” I said.

“Too bad, he so fit the profile. A life spent in deception, finally too much.”

I shrugged.

“How are you with this kid’s death?” I said.

“I’ve gone over every therapy session ten times.”

“You remember them all?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And I did what there was to do,” Susan said.

“And better than most people could have,” I said.

“How do you know,” Susan said. “You’ve never been in therapy with me.”

I smiled.

“Why, this is therapy,” I said. “Nor am I out of it.”

“Hamlet?” Susan said.

“Mephistopheles,” I said.

“Who?”

“Marlowe,” I said. “Doctor Faustus.”

“Smarty-pants.”

“So how come I can’t figure out what’s going on with the Nathan Smith thing?”

“I’ll bet you could if Christopher Marlowe did it.”

“A slam dunk,” I said.

“Have you thought about what kind of woman marries a gay man?” Susan said.

“Yes.”

“Do you have a conclusion?”

“No. I can’t figure her out.”

“Maybe you need to,” Susan said. “Maybe you need to find out more about Mr. Smith’s life as a gay man. Maybe you need to find out why Mrs. Smith married him.”

“A tip?” I said. “A crime-stopper tip?”

“Two tips,” Susan said. “I have a Ph.d. from Harvard.”

“A hotbed of crime-stopping,” I said.

“A hotbed,” Susan said.

We drove on to Newburyport. Susan shopped. Pearl and I stood outside each shop, and waited. Pearl slept in the car while we ate lunch at the Black Cow. Susan and Pearl and I went for a walk on the beach at Plum Island. None of us talked about business for the rest of the day.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

I went over to Pequod Bank on Monday morning to talk with Marvin Conroy. He wasn’t there. I said I would wait. They were cool with it. I sat in a chair and watched people discuss checking accounts and loans for three hours. At noon I asked if there was a number for Conroy. There was. But they couldn’t give me his home phone number.

“Could you call him for me?” I said.

The acting second assistant junior auxiliary vice president who was working with me looked startled.

“Me? Call him at home?”

“Y. Yes.”

“Is it, ah, an emergency?” she said.

“Life and death,” I said.

“Not really?” she said.

“Really,” I said.

She hesitated. I fixed her with my gleaming blue stare. She shrugged and opened her Rolodex and picked up the phone. She gave her hair a little toss to get the phone in under it, and dialed a number. I waited. She was wearing one of those thin, loose-fitting ankle-length flowered dresses that women sometimes wore in Cambridge, I assumed in tribute to a long-gone hippie past. Hers was especially sporty, tan with brown flowers. Whether there was any kind of worthwhile body going on underneath there was difficult to say, but I was ready to give her the benefit of the doubt.

She hung up the phone.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “There’s no answer. Would you like to leave a message for him?”

“You have an address for him?” I said.

“Certainly not,” she said.

I glanced at her Rolodex and she grabbed it and clutched it to her as if she were protecting its virtue. I smiled at her.

“You’ve been more than kind,” I said.

Back in my car I called Bobby Kiley’s office. Argued with the switchboard operator, and the receptionist, and Kiley’s secretary until I got through.

“It would be easier calling the Pope,” I said, when he was on the phone.

“But less useful,” Kiley said. “What do you want?”

“How’s Ann?”

“She’s lousy.”

“I need to know Marvin Conroy’s address,” I said.

“I’ll call you back,” Kiley said.

I gave him my car phone number, which I could never remember and therefore had written on a piece of paper tucked over the sun visor. Then I sat and looked at life in East Cambridge for maybe ten minutes until Kiley called back.

Conroy lived in an apartment in the North End on Commercial Street across from the Coast Guard station and a little ways down the street from the old garage where the Brink’s Robbery had taken place. I went up four cement steps and looked at the small sign that said NORTH CHURCH REALTY. LONG AND SHORT TERM RENTALS. I read the names on the mailboxes. Conroy was on the second floor. I rang. No luck. There were seven other names on the mailboxes. I rang all of them. Only one person, a woman, who sounded sleepy, answered through the speaker.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m from the cable company. We need to check some terminals.”

“Well, check them some other time, pal,” the woman said. “I’m trying to take a freakin‘ nap.”

The speaker went dead. Okay, if the terminals went bad it wasn’t my fault. I leaned my fanny on the black iron porch rail and thought about it. As I was thinking a young man in a gray suit and big glasses came up the steps with his key out. I fumbled in my pockets.

“Oh God,” I said. “I’m staying in 2B and I can’t find my keys.”

He smiled blankly and nodded and opened the door. I walked in right behind him. He disappeared into the elevator. I took the stairs. When I got to Conroy’s place, I looked around in the small hallway. There was only one other apartment. I went to it and knocked on the door. No one answered. I went back to Conroy’s door and kicked it in.

Inside was bedroom, sitting room, bath, kitchenette. It was charmless and impersonal. It showed little signs of occupancy. Cereal in the kitchen cabinet and half a loaf of bread, orange juice, and milk in the refrigerator. Two utility bills on the kitchen counter, both overdue. There were no clothes in the closet. No toiletries in the bath. A bath towel was crumpled on the floor. I picked it up. It was wrinkled, but no longer damp. There were no credit-card receipts, no answering machine with phone messages, no personal computer with e-mail messages. No clue at all about where Marvin Conroy had gone, or who he was.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Maybe I should do what Susan said. I had rarely gotten in trouble doing that, and I had absolutely nowhere else to go. Susan had designated two areas of possible interest: Smith’s sexual orientation, and his marriage. Since Larson Graff was an associate of Mrs. Smith, and pretty surely gay, I thought I might as well start with him. Given what I had, I might just as well have started with Liberace if he were still with us.