I didn’t want to hear about it. “You’ve seen it a dozen times. Good for you. I’ve seen it once and I hate it. I hate it and I don’t understand it. I don’t believe it, either.”

Mel rose from his chair and walked outside, leaving me listening to sounds I had rarely heard on other evenings: traffic on the twin high bridges, feet shuffling along the boardwalk, muffled noises from factories along the bay. When he returned he said, “There’s an open bottle of wine with him.”

I told him I knew that. I knew all about it. Merlot. Rich, red, chewy Merlot. That’s what we drank.

Walter Freeman entered the kitchen with authority and without knocking. “Josie,” Walter said, “I need a statement.”

“About what?”

“About Gabe calling you tonight.”

“Who told you that?”

“I did,” Mel said. “Somebody has to put the facts down.”

“Then put down the fact that my husband did not commit suicide.” I was crying again. Tears must be inexhaustible.

Walter gestured to Mel, who rose from the chair and walked outside. Walter took his place at the table, watching me as he set his wire-bound notebook in front of him. He reached for a pen in the pocket of his cheap shirt. Walter always wore cheap clothes. Walter had no class. “Walter Freeman is a man,” Gabe said to me once, “who is confident enough in himself to be an ass and not care about it. You have to admire him for that.” I did not admire Walter for anything.

“You see this?” Walter said. He took a small page of lined paper from inside his notebook. Two pieces of sticky tape extended on either side, like coiled transparent wings. On the note was, I’m in the bushes. Get naked! It looked like Gabe’s writing. It was Gabe’s writing.

I shook my head.

“It was stuck to the door, the back door,” Walter said. “Look like Gabe’s writing to you?”

I nodded.

Walter inserted the note between the pages of his notebook. “What did Gabe say when he called you tonight?”

“He asked me to come home. You saw the note. He wanted me to go with him into the bushes.”

“Why?”

I looked at Walter, who was staring at me with the same expression he wore, I suspected, while reading a telephone directory. I did not want to speak to Walter, and I wanted him to know it, so I replaced my despair with anger. It made a good substitute. “Why the hell do you think?”

Walter blinked. “We didn’t find his clothes. It appears he left the house naked, wrapped in the blanket. Once you’re inside those bushes at night, nobody can see you.”

“Do you suppose that’s why he wanted to make love there?”

Walter wrote something in his notebook, and as he wrote he said, “Tell me what time your husband called you. At a retirement home, was it?”

“Trafalgar Towers. My mother lives there. I work there twice a week. You already know that. It was around nine.”

Walter’s eyebrows moved up his forehead and stayed there. “It’s past eleven now. You haven’t been here for, what? Half an hour? What took you so long?”

“I walked.”

“Which way? Along the highway?”

“Along the lake to the bridge.”

“Any reason you came down the lake tonight, didn’t walk along the road?”

I shrugged.

“Coming back along the road should have taken you twenty minutes. Half an hour at the most. You took over an hour to get here. Why so long?”

“I was not aware that a wife needs to drop everything and run home just because her husband wants to screw her in the moonlight.”

I watched Walter’s eyebrows descend slowly into place. “What was the state of your marriage?” he asked. He was making notes again.

“The state of our marriage? What the hell kind of question is that?” I looked away, then back again. “The state of our marriage? I don’t know. Michigan? No, Florida. Gabe liked Florida. How’s that for a state of marriage? If Florida is a state of marriage, is Nevada a state of divorce?”

“Josie—”

“Call me Mrs. Marshall. That’s my name. My husband is dead, so I’m the widow Marshall now, but it’s still my name, and you damn well better use it.”

It was a tantrum, but I thought I deserved to throw one and Walter Freeman deserved to catch it. He drew a deep breath and started to speak, but I wasn’t finished. “Did Gabe leave a note? Where’s his note?”

“There is no note.” Walter nodded at his own words as though confirming something. He looked up at me. “Was your marriage happy, Mrs. Marshall?”

“Delirious.”

“Are you certain?”

“I know when I’m happy.”

“Did your husband give you any gifts?”

“Of course he gave me gifts. And I gave him gifts.”

“Expensive ones? Recently?”

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

“Were there conflicts in your marriage?”

“Conflicts? Like arguments? Sure there were. We were married.”

“I was thinking of other partners. I was thinking of that kind of conflict.”

I shook my head. “Think about something else.”

“Neither of you was having an affair?”

“No.”

Whenever I lie, I’m convinced something happens to inform the other person that I am not being truthful. I blush, I look away, I stutter, my mouth gets dry, maybe my nose grows longer, I don’t know. Walter Freeman knew I was lying, and he sat looking at me, saying nothing, which made me so uncomfortable that I spoke first. “Who found Gabe’s body?”

Walter pushed both lips forward like a man playing a trumpet, a habit he had when thinking deeply, or as deeply as Walter’s intelligence could take him. “Couple of kids. Down on the beach. They heard the shot and thought it came from your house. One of them called us on his cell phone, and a bunch of them came up here, looking around. They found the opening into the bushes. Stomped all over the place. Screwed up a lot of things, but …” Walter shrugged.

“If I heard a gunshot, I’d run the other way.”

“So would most people over the age of twenty.” He stood up just as Mel entered the room again.

“They’re ready to take Gabe away,” Mel said. “Is there anything I can do, Josie? Somebody I can call?”

I could only shake my head. I could think of nobody I wanted to speak to. Only Gabe. “I want to go with him,” I said. “I want to see him and hug him.”

“I’ll arrange something,” Walter said. “You can follow the coroner’s vehicle in a cruiser. It’ll be out front. The officer will call you.” He walked out of the kitchen through the back door, and Mel took his place in the chair facing me.

“I know it’s hard to accept.” Mel looked back over his shoulder to confirm we were alone, then reached for my hand and held it as he spoke. “It always is. Gabe did it. He had reason to. We both know that. God, I feel terrible. Gabe was …” He dropped my hand and turned away.

“He wanted to make love to me.” I was crying again. Damn it, damn it.

“He carried his gun out there with him, Josie.” Mel turned back to me. “Maybe he planned to do something else.”

“Like what?”

He wiped his eyes and looked at me.

“Bullshit,” I said. “That’s bullshit, Mel. He wouldn’t do that. Gabe loved me.”

“He knew things.”

“He suspected them. Unless you told him. Did you tell him, Mel? Jesus, did you tell him?”

Mel shook his head. “How could I? Why would I?” He knelt to look directly at me. “It’s his weapon, Josie. They’ll retrieve the bullet, and when they match it to his gun, what else can they think?”

I walked to the cupboard next to the refrigerator and opened the top drawer. Then I walked to the pantry and looked behind the sugar. Gabe always followed the same routine with his weapon when he was off duty, removing the ammunition clip and placing it in the drawer near the refrigerator, and keeping the gun itself in the pantry behind the sugar. All the cops had their own way of dealing with their guns. Gabe told me they joked with each other about it. One put his ammunition clip inside an empty cereal box. Another hid his behind his wife’s box of tampons.