I asked him how he knew that.

He closed the binder and slipped his Montblanc into his jacket pocket. “It’s been previously discussed,” he said, “between me and the Crown. Freeman is just learning about it now.”

Let’s have a cheer for our legal system, I thought.

“HOW CLOSE DID YOU COME to shooting Holiday in the head when you fired the gun?” Robinson asked. He was driving me back to the beach strip. His car was expensive, quiet, dark, warm, and smelled of Italian leather. I could marry a car like that.

“I don’t know. I aimed for the open window. Missed him by maybe three or four inches.”

“Clever of you to fire the bullet into the sand, to preserve the rifling marks.”

“I’d rather have buried it in his head.”

“Why not let the police do the test, once you explained it to them?”

“Who would believe me? Who would even listen to me? Who would ask for Mel’s gun to do forensics on it on the basis that I, Gabe’s crazy widow, was claiming that Mel Holiday had murdered three men, including my husband? I was sure I’d worked things out. How Mel had switched guns after shooting Gabe, substituting his own for Gabe’s, and when they were getting the bullet for the forensics lab, how he told Hayashida the serial number of Gabe’s gun, then in Mel’s holster, rather than reading him the serial number of the gun in evidence. And how Hayashida trusted Mel enough to record it without inspecting it himself. Then Mel switched guns again, putting his own gun back in his holster and filing Gabe’s in an evidence locker. Someday, somebody might have tested both guns, compared the results with Gabe’s and Dalgetty’s autopsy reports, and realized what Mel had pulled off, but it wasn’t likely. And nobody was ever going to get anything from what was left of Honeysett’s head.”

“Walter Freeman said he suspected all along that the metal they found in Honeysett’s remains had been a bullet.”

“Walter Freeman would say he suspected the sun would come up in the morning if it made him look good. How could he stand it?”

“Freeman? Stand what?”

“Not him. Mel Holiday. How could he stand holding Honeysett’s body like that, waiting for the bridge to come down on his head?”

“You’d be surprised what some people can do in desperate straits.” We were approaching my house. “Besides, he was a homicide detective for how many years?”

“Ten. Maybe more.”

“Would you care to guess how many mangled bodies he encountered in ten years? How many autopsies he attended? Holding a body until the skull is crushed wouldn’t be a picnic for anybody, but if it were necessary, a guy like him could do it. You can get used to anything, Mrs. Marshall.”

I could get used to being in the company of a man like Robinson very late at night, every night, but when he stopped outside my door, I simply thanked him, stumbled inside, and climbed the stairs to my bed. The peeper in the garden shed was long gone. Mel Holiday was locked up, probably for life. I had a high-powered lawyer retained by an influential gangster to defend me. When Tina heard the news, she might actually admit that I have more intelligence than a string of barbed wire.

I hadn’t slept so well in weeks.

MOTHER, OF COURSE, WAS SURPRISED to see me the next morning. She had finished her breakfast and was sitting at her window, watching the strollers on the boardwalk and along the canal. I startled her when I entered, and I hugged her longer and more firmly than normal, which made her reach for her chalk and blackboard and write, Why are you here so early? Is something wrong?

I assured her that nothing was wrong, and told her that the police had solved Gabe’s murder. It was another police officer, I said. In fact, it had been Gabe’s partner.

Mother’s hand, gripping the chalk, flew across the blackboard like a drunken insect, writing, Mel Holiday?

“Yes,” I said. “How did you know? Has it been on the news?” Walter Freeman had told Robinson that nothing would be revealed until the forensic examination of the bullets from Mel’s and Gabe’s guns was completed and charges laid.

She wrote, He was here. Then she added, You slept with him, didn’t you?

I sat on the edge of the bed. I think it is a wonderful thing for a daughter to be surprised and impressed by her mother, no matter what their ages. At the moment, I just wished it were some other daughter. “When was he here?” I asked.

She wrote, The day before yesterday. The day you left for Tina’s. In the afternoon.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She wrote, I didn’t want to upset you.

“What did he want?”

She erased everything she had written earlier and wrote, He wanted to talk to me. He wanted me to talk to him. She looked up and smiled at that.

I had mentioned Mother to Mel, I suppose. Only that I visited her now and then, and I had named the retirement home. I’d told him she had suffered a stroke, but I had not explained that she was unable to speak. “What did he want to talk about?”

Mother wrote, What I knew about Gabe’s death. What you had told me about it.

“Did you tell him anything? By writing it down?”

She shook her head, erased the blackboard again, and wrote, I told him to leave and asked for a nurse to take him out.

“Did he tell you …” I had to start again. “Did he say that he and I … that we …” Damn. Then, in a torrent, “Did he say that he and I had slept together?”

Mother smiled and shook her head.

“You could tell, couldn’t you? You figured it out all by yourself.”

She nodded.

Harold Hayashida arrived at my house after lunch. I made tea, and we sat in the living room, not fully comfortable in each other’s presence, like two patients waiting to see the same doctor.

He pulled a small sheet of paper from his inside jacket pocket and read from the notes. “Couple of things,” he said. “First, forensics says there’s no doubt that the projectile from the Glock G22 with serial number HPD7083, which is Mel’s gun, matches the one that killed Dalgetty and Gabe and probably Wayne Weaver Honeysett.” He looked up at me, his face downcast. “I trusted Mel, Josie. He read the serial number to me, I wrote it down, and we both signed the investigation document. I didn’t think I needed to examine the weapon myself. I was supposed to, but I didn’t. That was a mistake.”

“I made a much bigger mistake a couple of months ago,” I said, and Hayashida nodded. I had no secrets now.

“Gabe’s gun was serial number HPD7836, in case you were interested.”

“Has Mel confessed?”

“He’s told us some things, things he can’t refute. He’s being charged with three homicides.”

“Do you think Mel showed up at our house intending to kill Gabe? Or was it a spur-of-the-moment thing, maybe when Gabe tried to get at him?”

“This much he told us. He said Gabe came at him. He didn’t plan on killing him. Mel says the gun went off and he dropped it there. Claims he didn’t wipe his hand on Gabe’s. Just got the hell out of the bushes.”

“And Honeysett watched him go.”

“Apparently. Mel knew where Gabe’s gun was in the kitchen, took it, and went out the front door.” Hayashida smiled and shrugged. “Of course …”

“Of course what?”

“Saying it happened that way makes it second-degree murder, not first-degree. Reacting instead of planning. Might get paroled, someday.”

“He’s facing two other murder charges, right?”

“If his statements hold up, he’ll be sentenced for second-degree on those, as well. In both cases he said he hadn’t planned anything in advance. Blamed it on his hot temper. Makes it hard to get a first-degree conviction. Not that it will make much difference for twenty-five years or so. And there’s more. We got a tip that he received around a hundred thousand dollars in payoffs from street criminals over the past year.”