I said I didn’t.

“You should go sometime. Nice, sexy woman like you. You go with a man who can show you the sights, somebody who knows where to find good food, good wine, nice scenery. Anyway, I go there last year, somebody offers to sell me the font, I pay money, a shitload of money, and I get it sent here at my expense, pay every dime, you wouldn’t believe how many dimes I paid. The bishop takes it, puts it up front in the church, holds a Mass, blesses it, says it’s a gift from God, doesn’t mention me. That’s okay. He wants people in the church to think it came from God instead of Mike Pilato, what can I do? Then a week, two weeks later, he’s talking about all the low-lifes in this town, how the police’ve gotta clear out all this criminal element, and if they don’t, God and his angels will do it for them, lightning bolts and eternal damnation, all that merda. It was in the newspaper, the stuff he said. He’s pounding on the pulpit, the same guy who wet his pants over the marble font he got from me, saying just because people try to do good things, make parks and stuff, this doesn’t make up for the bad things they do, how they offend God. So who’s he talking about when he says that, eh? Everybody knows.”

He stopped talking to wave his hand, indicating the outside world. “Everybody knows. The next day I go into the church, and there’s the font, all polished and shiny. The one I gave him, the one he thanked me for, and nobody knows. Nobody knows I gave it to him—to the church, but to him too.”

“That was very nice of you,” I said. “Very generous.”

“Not my point. You got any idea what it takes to bring something like that, four hundred, five hundred years old, out of a country, out of Italy?”

“I don’t do that kind of thing very often.”

“You better not. The cops’ll be all over you.” His voice rose and the edge hardened. “You only do it with people you know, people you trust, people like yourself, and then you gotta grease their palms, put enough money in the right hands, and maybe they give you the papers to export it, and maybe the guys at this end, over here, maybe the assholes in customs here think the papers are real, so they let you bring it in. That’s how you do this kind of stuff, all right? Everybody knows that. Including the bishop.”

I was getting his point. “And he didn’t care.”

“He didn’t care. He didn’t ask, he didn’t want to know. He just wanted his marble font for his brutto little church. And he got it. Then he treats me like immondizia. He treats me like garbage.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Go to the trouble and expense of bringing the font into the country.”

He actually thought about this for a moment. Maybe no one had asked him before. “The people around here, they like it,” he said. “I thought maybe the bishop, he’d put one of them little brass signs on it, the font, just to say it was a gift from Mike Pilato in memory of his mother or his dog, I didn’t care. Or maybe he recognizes me at a party, a reception I go to and I write cheques for this and that, feed the children, save the whales. But he doesn’t. Just turns away, finds somebody else to talk to. When I gave it to him, the baptismal font, I said, ‘Maybe you can put something on it, says I gave it, okay?’ and he says it wouldn’t be appropriate. ‘It wouldn’t be appropriate.’ It was appropriate for me to pay some dago son of a bitch in Naples enough money to buy himself a used car so I can get the font out of Italy, but not appropriate for the bishop to thank me. Doesn’t matter.” He looked to one side, with an expression that said he was lying. “The people here on my street, the people who like me, protect me, they know who brought that font over.” He glanced at his watch. “That’s all I got to say.”

“What did you think of my husband, Gabe Marshall? You said you met him. What did you think of him?”

“Nice guy. For a cop.”

“What about Wayne Weaver Honeysett?”

Again, his expression floated between amusement and anger. “What, maybe I should get a lawyer in here? You think I got time to sit here and have you talk to me like I’m in court? You’re some broad.” And he actually smiled.

“Please,” I said. “I appreciate your time and everything.”

“Honeysett? The jeweller they found under the bridge, his head crushed? Never met him.”

“How do you know his head was crushed? There was nothing in the newspapers about it.”

“You think I’m the kind of guy needs to read newspapers to know what’s happening?” He began sucking on a back tooth.

For an instant, I considered asking Pilato what else he knew about Honeysett’s death. Then sanity returned, and I had another question. “Why is some guy, who looks like he’s lived on a desert island for a couple of years, knocking on my door and demanding to see somebody named Grizz?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I was out of questions. “Thank you,” I said, standing up. “I’ll go now.”

He followed me to the door, where, I realized, we had been locked in with a complicated system that operated from an electronic keypad. He entered a combination on the keypad, and we both stood in silence while the mechanism whirred and a green light on the wall began flashing. The door swung open, and I walked ahead of Pilato through the dull, dusty foyer to the outer door. As I approached it, it swung inward, opened by the man with the broom and the old fedora.

“Thanks for your time,” I said, turning back to Mike Pilato, who remained inside the building, out of sight of the plumber’s van.

“Sure.” He stood watching me, in no hurry to return to his office.

“I’m sorry if I asked too many questions,” I added.

“It’s not the questions you asked you should think about,” he said. “It’s the question you didn’t ask.”

I closed my eyes. What the hell. “Did you kill my husband?”

“No.”

I opened my eyes and saw him looking at me. How could I believe him? “Thank you,” I said. I walked through the open area, still vacant, to the outer door.

“That’s not the question I meant.”

I turned to see Mike Pilato turning to enter his office, saw the door close behind him, and heard the mechanism lock him inside.

The man with the broom and the fedora resumed sweeping the immaculate walkway, stepping aside to permit me to pass.

The plumber’s van remained where it had been parked when I arrived. I smiled and waved in its direction.

21.

The telephone was ringing as I arrived home. I usually play the game of speculating who might be calling before I answer. Two weeks earlier I would have believed it was Gabe. I was almost assuming that as I picked up the receiver and said hello.

“What would you like me to buy you?” a male voice said. I recognized it from the call a few days earlier. I also recognized it from somewhere else. I knew that voice. At last, a pervert I could identify, over the telephone, at least.

“I don’t want you to buy me anything,” I said. “But I want you to tell me how you got this number.”

The voice lost its threatening edge and actually stuttered over the next few words. “I … I, uh, I did … didn’t want to upset you, Mrs. Marshall. You’re in the telephone book, and I just wondered if you would like to talk, maybe over a coffee or something, you know?”

“No, I don’t know. And why are you calling me, anyway?”

“Maybe I’d better call back some other time.” He hung up before I could hit him with a decent Oscar Wilde put-down.

I was left standing with the receiver in my hand, telling myself over and over, I know that voice, I know that voice …

THE YEAR AFTER MY FIRST HUSBAND LEFT ME for Little Miss Lemon Hair, I lived with a man who called himself a nihilist, a word I looked up in the dictionary after our second date. He made it sound like a career choice, like being a philosopher or a dentist. I figured it was just another way of explaining why he couldn’t keep a job.