“Always possible,” I said. “I leave enough loose ends. On the other hand, what do you shrinks think about coincidences?”

“They occur, but it is not a good idea to assume them.”

“That’s what we sleuths think about them, too,” I said.

“So if this were the open-and-shut it seems to be,” Susan said, “why would anyone follow you?”

“Why indeed?” I said.

“Do you have a theory?”

“Nothing so grand,” I said. “The tail aside, there’s a lot I don’t like about this. I don’t like how lousy Mary Smith’s alibi is. I don’t like the sense I get that there’s a lot I’m not being told.”

“By whom?”

“By Mary Smith. By a guy named Roy Levesque that she was in high school with. By a guy named DeRosa who says Mary asked him to kill Nathan. By the woman I talked with at Nathan’s bank. Nice woman, Amy Peters.”

“As nice as I am?” Susan said.

“Of course not,” I said. “She has information, or at least a theory, that she’s not sharing. So does Mary Smith’s PR guy. I’d also like to figure out why a stiff like DeRosa is represented by an attorney from Kiley and Harbaugh.”

“But you have a plan,” Susan said.

“I always have a plan,” I said.

“Let me guess,” she said. “I’ll bet you plan to keep blundering along annoying people, and see what happens.”

“Wow,” I said. “You shrinks can really read a guy.”

“Magical, isn’t it,” she said.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I was on the low doorstep of a three-decker on Lithgow Street off Codman Square, looking for Esther Morales. She opened the door on my second ring, a small tan woman with bright intelligent eyes.

“Si?”

“My name is Spenser,” I said. “I’m working for Mary Smith. You do her housecleaning.”

“I clean for Mr. Smith,” she said. “Fifteen years.”

“Not Mrs. Smith?”

“She come along. I clean for her, too.”

“The police think she murdered her husband. What do you think?”

“I think I am very impolite. Please come into my house.”

“Thank you.”

She took me to the kitchen in the back of the house and made me some coffee. The woodwork and cabinets were stained a dark brown and gleamed with many coats of varnish. The vinyl tile flooring was made to look like quarry tile and gleamed with many coats of wax. I sat at a glistening white metal kitchen table and drank from a mug with a Red Sox logo on it.

Esther Morales sat across the table from me and had some coffee, too.

“Are you with the police?” she said.

“No,” I said. “I’m a private detective hired by the lawyer who represents Mrs. Smith.”

“So you are trying to help Mrs. Smith?”

“I’m sort of trying to find out the truth of what happened,” I said.

“She killed him.”

“You know that?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me what you know,” I said.

“Mr. Smith was a very nice man. He was very pleasant. He paid me well and gave me nice presents on the holidays.”

I nodded.

“Then she came,” Esther said.

“Yes?”

“She is not nice.”

“How so?” I said.

Esther frowned. I realized that she didn’t understand the expression.

“What wasn’t nice about her?” I said.

“She was bossy. She yelled at me. She yelled at Mr. Smith.”

“What did she yell about?”

“She would yell about money.”

Why should they be different.

“Anything else?” I said.

“I could not always hear them and, sometimes, when people speak too fast or speak oddly, my English…” She shrugged.

“How about Mr. Smith? He ever yell at her?” I said, “No. He was very kind to her. Sometimes she would make him cry.”

“They have friends over?”

“She did,” Esther said.

Esther disapproved of the friends.

“Female friends?” I said.

“No.”

“How about Mr. Smith?”

“Only the young men.”

“Young men?”

“Yes. He helped them. He was a, I don’t know the word in English. Mentor.”

“Same in English,” I said. “He mentors young men?”

“Yes. He is very generous. He helps poor boys to go to school and learn to do work and get ahead.”

“And they came to his house?”

“Yes. He would teach them at his home.”

“How about Mrs. Smith. She ever teach them?”

Esther was too nice to snort, but she breathed out a little more than normal.

“And why do you think she killed him?”

“For money.”

“His inheritance?” I said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Money he would leave her.”

“Yes.”

“Was there a gun anywhere around the house?”

“I did not see one.”

“Do you know anything I could use to prove that she killed him?” I said.

“She is a bad woman.”

I nodded.

“Anything else?”

“Just what I have told you.”

“Do you know anyone else who might have killed Mr. Smith?”

“No. It was she.”

I finished the last of my coffee.

“This is very good coffee, Mrs. Morales.”

“Would you wish more?”

“No. Thank you very much. I’ve kept you long enough.”

Esther walked me to the door.

“She is a terrible woman,” Esther said.

“Maybe she is,” I said.

I thanked her again and left and walked back toward Codman Square past a dark blue Ford with its motor on, to the convenient hydrant where I had parked my car.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Since she was a pillar of the community and adjudged not a flight risk, and because she had a dandy lawyer, Mary Smith was out on bail. So I could call on her in her home, rather than at the Suffolk County jail. It was nonetheless a daunting prospect. It was like talking to a dumb seventh-grader.

Rita Fiore let me in when I rang the bell. She was spectacular in a slim black and green polka-dot skirt and a bright green blouse.

“Mary asked me to sit in on your meeting,” Rita said.

“Doesn’t she get it that we’re on the same side?” I said.

“I think she doesn’t like to be alone with people.”

“They might use a big word?”

“Kindness, now,” Rita said. “Kindness.”

We went into an atrium that looked over the small spectacular garden that someone maintained for Mary in the not entirely nourishing soil of Beacon Hill.

Mary stood when we came in. She was wearing high-waisted gray slacks and a white silk scoop-neck T-shirt. She was barefoot. A pair of black sling-back shoes were on the floor near the couch. One of them was upright. The other had fallen over.

“Oh, Mr. Spenser,” she said, and put out her hand like a lady in a Godey print. “It is so lovely to see you. I mean it. It’s really lovely.”

“Gee,” I said.

“Will you have coffee?”

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m trying to cut back.”

“Good for you.”

“Brave,” Rita said.

I ignored her.

“Mrs. Smith,” I said. “Do you ever eat in a restaurant located in a store?”

“Louis‘,” she said. “They have a lovely cafe. I often have lunch there.”

One point for DeRosa.

“Do you know a man named Roy Levesque?” I said.

“Who?”

“Roy Levesque.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You went to high school with him. Dated him for a while, I believe.”

“Oh, that one.”

“Yes.”

Mary sat, quiet and attentive and blank. It wasn’t like talking to a dumb seventh-grader, it was like talking to a pancake.

“You still see him,” I said.

Mary smiled and shrugged.

“Old friends,” she said. “You know? Old friends.”

“Whom you just a minute ago said you didn’t know.”

She smiled and nodded. I waited. She smiled some more. Rita crossed her legs the other way.

“Tell me about the young men that your husband, ah, mentored,” I said.

Rita glanced at me. Mary smiled some more.

“He was so kind to them,” Mary said. “He’d been a lonely little boy, I guess, and he wanted to make it easier for other lonely little boys.”

“He give them money?” I said.